​The American journey of three generations locks the neophyte company president, Burton Blake, in a vicious struggle with corporate intrigue,  economic greed, and social and financial corruption that feed on the underlying ageless tyranny of unregulated free enterprise.
 
Following World War II, Elias Blake’s youth is influenced by the adult world’s drive for personal material gain.  Over the next decades, he expands his parents’ original real estate empire into the diversified multi-divisional, multi-national corporation that he leaves to his son, Burton.
 
What events following World War II influence Elias Blake as a child and eventually as a young man and mold him to become the father whom his son despises? How was society different in the 1950s than it is today? What were the prevailing attitudes toward the role of women? How does Kristina Holtzman overcome those prejudices and social standards of behavior?
 
How would you compare Burton Blake’s life with that of his paternal great grandmother, Julie Josephson/Holtzman in the novel The Revolutionist?
What social, political, economic, and technological conditions are different? What has changed since the early 1900s?
 
What is Burton Blake’s reaction when he reads his father’s obituary? Why does he say what is being asked of him by Alan Erdman, the corporate attorney, is impossible?
 
Why does Burton Blake resist and try to deny his father’s legacy? How is he different than his father, Elias Blake, and why? Do they have any character and personality similarities? If so, how would you describe them?

​The Revolutionist chronicles powerful social, political, and economic forces at the turn of the 20th Century that affect the lives of all the characters in various ways and provide the foundation for the novel. From the very beginning and throughout her story, the protagonist, Julie Josephson, encounters situations where she must make difficult choices and react in various ways to survive. As you read the book, identify at what point in the novel she realizes she does not have to be a victim, but can resist and fight against those forces. What are the circumstances and what does she do to change her life?
 
 
How does the conclusion of the novel provide a sense of hope and redemption?
 
  

​With its strategic geographic location to the iron ore mines of Minnesota and Michigan, Chicago was a center for steel production during the late 1800s and into the 1900s. Shipping routes on the Great Lakes from the mining ranges and Chicago’s railroad industry hub are the lynchpin for the entrepreneurial Bauman Brothers to grow their business in The Revolutionist.
 
As benefactors of Julie Josephson, the humanitarianism of Kurt and Matias Bauman clashes with the corruption and ruthless tactics of competitive industrialists and bankers.
 
Steel production during the early1900s employed hundreds of thousands of workers, contributed to the emergence of the middle-class, and the further rise of unionism.
The history of steel production in Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania and its later demise, as major steel manufacturing went offshore, is a center-point in the evolution of the U.S. and the global economy.
 
The early 1900s heralded the invention of new manufacturing processes, steam power, chemical and steel production, and the transition from hand to machine production and the creation of factories. Julie Josephson becomes embroiled in the Industrial Workers of The World (IWW) as a union organizer supporting the rise of the working class striking for better wages and safe and healthy working conditions. The IWW promoted the platform of industrial unionism and workplace and economic democracy. Skilled and unskilled men and women and workers from all nationalities were welcome as members. During World War I and after, their influence ended with the imprisonment of 10,000 organizers and the deportation of many thousands as foreign agitators.
 
 

Having come from an agrarian origin, Julie Josephson's early life follows the transition of America into the Industrial Age and the struggles of men and women against their subjugation and exploitation by capitalists and corrupt politicians in the chaos of an emerging middle-class society.
 
From an historical perspective, the recurrence of political corruption, the lack of ethics, morality, racial prejudice, and of an appreciation for human value in modern times is an example of history repeating itself.
 
Through the eyes of Julie and other characters, the chapters titled Opium, Graft, Rising Up, Scabs, and Strike take the reader deep into the heart of what happened during that period.
 
Excerpt
 
     An angry crowd had gathered at the front of the courthouse city hall bronze stone and colonnade edifice at the corner of La Salle and Clark Streets.  The Hansom cab in which O’Riley and Luther were riding could not get any closer than a half block from the steps.  Luther noticed that many of the mob shouted demands and epithets that echoed the terse hand-painted signs thrust high and waved over their heads like square antennae of a churning pulsating sea beast. 
 
     No Corruption              No More Graft           No More Boodling
     Stop Gray Wolves        End To Gray Wolves        Death To Gray Wolves

     The citizens of Chicago called corrupt politicians “gray wolves.”
The Municipal Voters League published the qualifications of candidates who demonstrated ethics and moral values in contrast to the voting records of aldermen holding current offices in the thirty-four wards. The League promoted candidates who pledged to support the merit system of civil service and end the bribes and kickbacks that diverted funds meant for the city into personal bank accounts.  The purpose of the League was to remove the Gray Wolves and end their strangle hold on the city government.

Urban Poverty Early 1900s
 
During the early 1900s, waves of immigrants from Europe and Asia settled in major American cities. Met with hostility from native-born Americans in competition for jobs, they were forced into poverty stricken ethnic neighborhoods and into dilapidated multi-family tenements. Witnessing such squalor in the Chicago slums plants the seeds of Julie Josephson’s revolutionary fervor nurtured by the Holtzman family’s involvement in union organizing.
 
Excerpt
 
         Sophie and Julie matched his quick stride and they left the main street for dank ghetto side streets and alleyways.  Without Matias and Sophie at her side, Julie would have been completely disoriented and lost.  They appeared to be familiar with the narrow passage through a nightmare of rough threatening neighborhoods punctuated by the curses of bearded besotted men and  raised voices of haggard women against a backdrop of shrill screams and the cries of children. 
    They finally slowed deep within the slum of encroaching dilapidated wooden apartments odorous with mold and the stench of charcoal fires and burning garbage. Tattered clothing hung from open windows between neighboring tenements on shared lines strung across the abyss of squalor below.  Matias stopped before a closed wooden door and rapped sharply three times with the back of his gloved right hand, paused, then rapped again.  A few moments passed, then a narrow slit the height of a man slid open from inside and a single eye black, luminous as a drop of oil, peered out darting back and forth and up and down assessing who stood on the threshold. 
       After another moment, they heard the squeak and grind of a heavy metal bolt thrown back and the door was pulled open.  Julie’s unasked question as to why only one eye had looked at them through the slit was answered.  The man’s eye patch and curly hair gave him the aspect of a pirate.
  

​Although the escape of the Bauman brothers from Berlin, Germany sets the novel in motion, their backstory beginning in 1888 determines what happens when they re-establish their transportation company in Chicago.
 
At the time, Germany struggled under the oppressive dictatorship of Otto Von Bismarck, who ruled through an elite bureaucracy called Junkers and secret police, Geheime Feldpolizei.
He banned all Social Democratic associations, meetings, and newspapers, an act that drives the resistance of Alfred Wohlman – the Jewish President of a European rail and shipping transportation company headquartered in Berlin. Alfred is a Social Democrat and secret political activist who works with an underground network of agents, presses, and clandestine resistance groups that communicate the socialist cause. Over a thousand members of the resistance were incarcerated, including Alfred Wohlman. As fugitives from the sadistic Rudolph Palm’s secret police, his sons, Kurt and Matias, who changes his name to Heinrich Bauman, barely escape to America to avoid the same fate as their father.