The Times and Social Conditions That Influence Julie To Become A Revolutionist

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.