Booker T. Washington's Invisible Man

1900, the second industrial revolution is at its peak. Andrew Carnegie has already created his steel empire, John D. Rockefeller’s has just retired from his job as owner and runner of the Standard Oil Company, Upton Saint Clair will publish The Jungle in 1906. The United States has successfully surpassed the rest of the world in industry, but at a price. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Homestead Massacre of 1892 represent the extreme dissatisfaction workers have with their employment, and the conversely brutal responses of companies. No state or federal laws existed to protect the workers; workers found it impossible to hold companies responsible for injuries or deaths. Resentment against blacks and immigrants is high, because they

Unions ares still in their beginnings. However, work environment is not the problem plaguing the United States, racial problems are also rampant. The Great Migration of blacks to northern factories is occuring. Invisible Man, published in 1952, just 87 years after the end of the American Civil War, shows blacks are still alarmingly separate from white society. In fact, the novel is published in the midst of African-American Civil Rights movement. Booker T. Washington has fought for black economic self-sufficiency as means for equality and formed the NAACP. W.E.B. DuBois also fights for black equality using different methods. Martin Luther King Jr. is about to make his debut as a leading advocate of peaceful protests to achieve equality. Rosa Parks will be arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger. By the time of the novel’s publication, Malcolm X has become a leader to African Americans, still under the guidance of Elijah Muhammad. In 1954, the Supreme Court will strike down the “separate but equal” doctrine, marking an accomplishment for African Americans, but by no means a complete one. They still have to wait till 1957 for the Little Rock Nine to start the integration of schools. So, while the Jim Crow laws are being struck down, it is evident that whites still

The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, was published in 1848, giving communism a century to take root. Russia starts on its path to becoming the Soviet Union in 1917, when the Bolshevik Revolution breaks out, marking the beginning of the first Red Scare in the US (the second Red Scare gives rise to McCarthyism). Many americans feared a similar revolution in their own country, forcing people to question the possibility of infringements of liberties to keep the nation safe. The Vanzetti Case demonstrates the fear felt by Americans for communism and immigrant when two italians are falsely convicted of murder. Neither communism, anarchism, socialism, nor social democracy were distinguished during this time, all being equally