In 1892, an orphaned German teenager, Pauli, comes to America to live with his uncle's family in Chicago. He arrives with the typical immigrant's vision of a flawless new homeland. During the next 10 years he experiences firsthand labor strife; poverty, greed, and crime in the city's slums; and suffering in the Cuban battlefields of 1898. Increasingly, his idealistic picture of the country changes until the end of the book when he sees his new homeland as a place where "men are free." Likewise, the three-dimensional main characters have strengths and weaknesses, good points and faults. Theodore Roosevelt, Eugene Debs, Thomas Edison, Clara Barton, and Jane Addams make their appearances, and readers witness the growing labor-union movement, the women's-rights struggle, national expansionism, and the beginning of the moving-picture industry.
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