Marching Men is a 1917 novel by American author Sherwood Anderson. Published by John Lane, the novel is Anderson's second book; the first being the 1916 novel Windy McPherson's Son. Marching Men is the story of Norman "Beaut" McGregor, a young man discontented with the powerlessness and lack of personal ambition among the miners of his hometown. After moving to Chicago he discovers his purpose is to empower workers by having them march in unison. Major themes of the novel include the organization of laborers, eradication of disorder, and the role of the exceptional man in society. The latter theme led post-World War II critics to compare Anderson's militaristic approach to homosocial order and the fascists of the War's Axis powers.
Marching Men was written as a hobby project while Sherwood Anderson was still working in advertising. A combination of a small first run, mediocre reviews, and poor sales, convinced Anderson's publisher not to give Marching Men a second run. The novel has since been reprinted several times by other publishers including a 1927 Russian translation, yet is generally forgotten by the reading public except as a step in the development of its author.
Development history
Like Windy McPherson's Son, Sherwood Anderson wrote his second novel while he worked as an advertising copywriter in Elyria, Ohio between 1906 and 1913, several years before he published his first literary writing and a decade before he became an established writer. At least part of Marching Men was written in an attic room of Anderson's Elyria home, which he set up to escape familial demands and focus on writing. Though the author later claimed that he had written his first novels in secret, Anderson's secretary remembers typing the manuscript on company time "around 1911 or 1912".
Inspiration for Marching Men came in part from the author's time as a laborer in Chicago between 1900 and 1906 (where he, like his protagonist, worked in a warehouse, went to night school, was robbed, and fell in love several times) and his service in the Spanish–American War which took place towards the end of the war and just after the armistice in 1898–99. Of the latter, Anderson wrote in his Memoirs about the time he had been marching and got a rock in his shoe. After separating from his fellow soldiers to remove it, he observed them and recalled "I had become a giant. ... I was, in myself, something huge, terrible and at the same time noble. I remember that I sat, for a long time, while the army passed, opening and closing my eyes". Combined with his later reading of works by Thomas Carlyle, Mark Twain, and possibly Jack London, Anderson had inspiration for Marching Men that was both experiential and literary...
Plot summary
Books I–II
The novel begins with the fourteen-year-old Norman McGregor packaging a loaf of bread for his uncle, the "village wit", – who ironically nicknames him "Beaut" because of his off-putting appearance – in his mother Nance's Coal Creek bakery (bought with the savings of her late husband/Beaut's father "Cracked" McGregor). Not long after, frustrated by the local miners expecting bread on credit without first settling their debts, Beaut closes the bakery during a miner's strike. That evening, as the now-drunk miners move to ransack the bakery (and assault Beaut), he is saved by a troupe of soldiers marching in formation. After the episode, the bakery remains closed and Nance goes to work at the mining office while Beaut idles about. When Beaut is 18 years old, his mother becomes too ill to work and the young man gets a job as a stableboy. One day, as a prank, his fellow stableboys get Beaut (a teetotaler up to that point) blind drunk with a "horrible mess" made just for that purpose. Having reached a breaking point, Beaut takes the rest of his father's savings and leaves Coal Creek for Chicago on the same evening. He arrives in the City just after the 1893 World's Fair. Despite a shortage of jobs, McGregor easily finds a warehouse job and settles into a routine of work during the day and night school/independent reading at night. One day, in a break from the ordinary, the usually unsocial McGregor gives in to the urging of his neighbor Frank Turner, a barber and amateur violin-maker, and goes to a dance. Despite his aloofness, McGregor meets Edith Carson, a frail, mousy, and somewhat homely milliner/shop owner, with whom he develops a platonic relationship.