'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn' at 80

Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) turns 80 years old this year. The enduringly best-selling novel follows the travails of an Irish American family navigating and eventually overcoming poverty in the slums of Brooklyn before the first World War. Smith’s novel is valuable for its unique and rich depiction of the 1910’s Brooklyn landscape. But aside from bringing to vibrant life long-forgotten tenement buildings, shops, and people, the book has something to teach readers today about why educated elites, on both the right and the left, fail to understand working-class and poor Americans. 

Many on today’s elite right depict the poor (and especially the urban, now predominantly minority, poor) as beneath notice; they shrug off increasing income and wealth inequality as the inevitable price of economic growth. Meanwhile, many on today’s elite left depict the urban and minority poor as monolithic victims, evincing the politically correct bigotry of condescension by holding (despite both evidence and common sense to the contrary) that individual differences in work ethic and family formation are mere lifestyle choices that ought to carry no consequence. But in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Smith offers her readers the non-ideological truth, which remains fundamentally accurate 80 years later: Our lives are shaped both by social circumstance and by individual agency.

The book is a coming-of-age story: of an American girl, Francie Nolan, who is 11 at the start of the novel; and of the American dream. Far more important to the story’s staying power than the vivid precision with which Smith paints Brooklyn is her holistically compassionate yet unsparingly honest take on the characters who live there.

Smith allows her characters to lament and resent the knee-jerk censure that a just post-gilded-age New York has for the immigrant poor and their problems. Yet, at the same time, she uses both the book’s title metaphor (a tree made stronger by the adversity of its fight for growth) and countless asides therein to praise the possibilities of America, and to unequivocally lionize tenacity, grit, and persistence while condemning their opposites. 

Take Francie’s father, Johnny, for example. He is a “sweet singer of sweet songs” and a gentle, loving man. He is also an alcoholic who doesn’t provide well for his family, and who foretells that others will offer only a perfunctory “too bad” upon his early death and write him off as “nothing but a drunk.” 

Of course, as Smith gives us to understand, to know handsome, kind Johnny Nolan is to be unwilling to look past his human dignity and many sterling qualities — even while acknowledging his serious faults. For a thirteen-year-old Francie, the perfunctory reception of Johnny’s passing among those that do not really know him is evidence of a cruel, godless world in which all the poor are reduced to an inconvenient monolith of vices to be dismissed. 

Her father’s death is a sharper variation on the day she has to stop making mud pies to get vaccinated for school. The nurse who administers the shot, herself once a poor child, remarks on the little girl’s mud-caked arm, echoing the haughty doctor’s remonstration that poor people could at least wash, since “water is free, and soap is cheap.” The doctor and nurse see Francie’s dirty arm and make assumptions; they don’t really see Francie at all. 

Meanwhile, Francie and her mother, Katie, are “fighters.” Like the tree that grows out of cement by their front patio, no matter how many ways people try to “destroy it,” they muscle their way up. 

After Johnny dies, when Katie cannot figure out a way to make ends meet without his sporadic income, one of her sisters suggests that she go to “the Catholic Charities” for food baskets. Katie responds that she would sooner close every window in the house and turn on the gas stove. Unsurprisingly, given Katie’s fierce independence, Francie once lied to her mother about accepting a charity doll from a preening rich girl, whose conduct foreshadowed today’s virtue-signalers in that her greatest pleasure was not in providing the gift to a poor child, but in being fawned over for doing so. 

Katie’s mother, an illiterate German immigrant, calls it a “miracle” that Francie was born to two parents who can read and write. Despite desperate, grinding poverty, she believes that the American dream has already borne fruit. Katie, whose pragmatism and work ethic know no bounds, makes a richer harvest each year — ensuring even in widowhood that her children are provided for and, eventually, that Francie can pursue a college education. 

Smith’s message is clear: The Johnny and Katie Nolans of the world are, despite their manifold differences, too often made into a monolith by elites – and then treated by the right as if they were bereft of human dignity and by the left as if they were bereft of human agency. 

In the end, Smith’s book is less about understanding 1910’s Brooklyn than about understanding other people — not as representations of their place, time, creed, color, or class, but as fellow human beings and fellow Americans. 

Just like the tree growing out of cement in the novel, that kind of pluralistic understanding now has to fight against everything (political climate, cultural trends, and technological expediency) to grow and to thrive. 

That’s why I wonder whether anyone will be reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in another eight years, let alone 80. 

Let’s hope so.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew is a freelance writer and editor, an America’s Future Foundation Writing Fellowship alumna and a Young Voices contributor. Her work has appeared in America Magazine, Deseret News, The Hill, Law and Liberty, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Philadelphia Inquirer.