In 1919, one of every five American workers walked off the job.
Let that number settle. Not one in fifty. Not one in twenty. One in five. More than four million people — steelworkers, coal miners, garment workers, telephone operators, police officers, streetcar drivers — decided, in the same impossible year, that the conditions of their work were no longer acceptable. It was the most turbulent year in American labor history, and it’s the year The Promise Trilogy walks directly into.
I didn’t choose 1919 for the drama, though there’s plenty. I chose it because 1919 is the year when all the forces that had been building for decades — the labor exploitation, the immigrant surveillance, the gap between what the country promised and what it delivered — collided at once. Everything that had been simmering boiled over, and the country had to decide what it believed about the people who built it.
The history books remember the strikes by their names: the Great Steel Strike, the Boston Police Strike, the Seattle General Strike, the coal strikes that shut down mines across Appalachia. The numbers are staggering — 365,000 steelworkers alone, walking out of mills in six states.
But what the history sometimes misses — and what I wanted the novels to capture — is that these weren’t radical revolutionaries. They were men who wanted shorter hours, safer scaffolding, and wages that kept pace with the price of bread.
In The Promise Trilogy, Pavel files a safety report about the scaffolding at his construction site. The report goes nowhere. The scaffolding collapses. Viktor studies for his citizenship exam while working nights in a subway tunnel that could kill him — because the clean jobs don’t exist for men whose names are in federal files. These aren’t dramatic inventions. They’re the daily math of immigrant labor in 1919: the calculation every working family made between the danger of the job and the danger of having no job at all.
The steel mills ran twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. A steelworker’s annual earnings barely covered the cost of feeding a family of four. When workers asked for an eight-hour day — not a revolution, just eight hours — the companies called them Bolsheviks and sent in the police.
The federal government’s response to the 1919 strikes was not to address the conditions that drove workers to the picket lines. It was to call them dangerous and treat their organizing as a national security threat.
The Palmer Raids targeted immigrant workers with particular ferocity. A man who attended a union meeting could find his name on a deportation list. A woman who organized a relief kitchen for strikers’ families could find a federal agent at her door. The machinery of surveillance — Bureau of Immigration agents, Pinkerton detectives hired by the companies, informants recruited from inside the communities — was designed to make organizing so costly that workers would choose silence over solidarity.
Companies exploited ethnic divisions with professional efficiency, using Black workers as strikebreakers against white picket lines and immigrant workers against native-born ones. The strategy worked because the divisions were real — reinforced by hiring practices, neighborhood boundaries, and old-country suspicions that didn’t dissolve at the American shore. The cross-ethnic solidarity that organizers dreamed of — Italian construction workers standing beside Polish steelworkers beside Russian garment workers beside Irish dockmen — was attempted in 1919 and rarely achieved.
In the novel, Lucie writes rally speeches that have to do three things at once: inspire the workers in the room, persuade the public reading about it tomorrow, and give the federal agents taking notes nothing they can use. She frames workers’ demands in constitutional language — the same amendments she taught in her citizenship classroom — because wrapping a labor demand in patriotic cloth is the only way to make federal interference look like overreach rather than protection.
Behind every strike in 1919, there were women doing the work that made the picket lines possible. Feeding the families of striking workers. Organizing childcare so mothers could stand on the line themselves. Tracking which families needed coal, which needed medicine, which needed a lawyer who wouldn’t charge. This infrastructure — informal, dispersed, run out of kitchens and church basements — was as essential to the strikes as the picket signs, and it was almost entirely invisible in the newspapers.
The Women’s Trade Union League, founded in 1903, had been building cross-class alliances between working women and wealthy reformers for more than a decade. But in 1919, the most important organizing happened closer to the ground — in the mutual aid networks that immigrant women had been running since they arrived. Lillian Wald knew these networks existed because her nurses walked through them every day. When she proposed the women’s auxiliary in the novel — officially tasked with flu relief, unofficially a system for documenting what was happening to working families under surveillance — she was describing something that already existed in dozens of kitchens across the Lower East Side.
I should be honest about something. This history is not entirely abstract for me.
In June 1919 — five months before Lucie’s fictional rally — the Winnipeg General Strike shut down an entire Canadian city. For six weeks, thirty thousand workers walked off the job in solidarity across every trade and craft. Streetcars stopped running. Mail stopped moving. On June 21 — Bloody Saturday — the Royal North-West Mounted Police charged into a crowd of strikers. Two men were killed. Dozens were injured.
My grandfather was a striking streetcar operator, active in the union. The family story — the kind that gets passed down at kitchen tables, polished by retelling but never losing its sharp edges — is that he was injured in the horse charge and had to walk home through the back streets and shadows, trying not to be seen. I don’t know every detail of that walk. I know the family kept the story. I know they thought it mattered enough to tell.
When I wrote the scene where mounted police advance on the women at the docks — when I wrote the women stepping forward instead of back, because a horse trained for crowd control won’t trample a line that holds — I was thinking about Winnipeg. About what it costs to stand still when horses are coming. About the walk home afterward, through the shadows, when standing still has consequences.
The strikes of 1919 mostly failed, in the narrow sense. The steel strike was broken. The coal miners were ordered back to work by federal injunction. The Boston police who struck were fired and never rehired. The Palmer Raids picked off organizers and terrified their communities into silence.
But failure in 1919 planted seeds that grew. Frances Perkins, shaped by the Triangle fire and the labor battles that followed, would become FDR’s Secretary of Labor and the architect of the New Deal. The eight-hour day the steelworkers demanded in 1919 became law in 1923. The social welfare policies that emerged from the Depression — Social Security, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the right to organize — were built by people who had been in those rooms in 1919, who had done the arithmetic on scraps of paper, who remembered what it cost.
In The Promise Trilogy, the rally at the docks doesn’t solve anything. It’s one day. But it’s a day when people who had every reason to stay apart chose to stand together, and the choosing mattered more than the outcome. That’s what 1919 was — not a victory, but a rehearsal for the victories that came later, paid for by people whose names most of us will never know.