Line	Critics maintain that the fiction of Herman Melville
	(1819–1891) has limitations, such as its lack
	of inventive plots after Moby-Dick (1851) and its
	occasionally inscrutable style. A more serious, yet
(5)	problematic, charge is that Melville is a deficient
	writer because he is not a practitioner of the “art of
	fiction,” as critics have conceived of this art since the
	late nineteenth-century essays and novels of Henry
	James. Indeed, most twentieth-century commentators
(10)	regard Melville not as a novelist but as a writer of
	romance, since they believe that Melville’s fiction
	lacks the continuity that James viewed as essential
	to a novel: the continuity between what characters
	feel or think and what they do, and the continuity
(15)	between characters’ fates and their pasts or original
	social classes. Critics argue that only Pierre (1852),
	because of its subject and its characters, is close to
	being a novel in the Jamesian sense.
	However, although Melville is not a Jamesian
(20)	novelist, he is not therefore a deficient writer. A more
	reasonable position is that Melville is a different
	kind of writer, who held, and should be judged
	by, presuppositions about fiction that are quite
	different from James’s. It is true that Melville wrote
(25)	“romances”; however, these are not the escapist
	fictions this word often implies, but fictions that
	range freely among very unusual or intense human
	experiences. Melville portrayed such experiences
	because he believed these best enabled him to
(30)	explore moral questions, an exploration he assumed
	was the ultimate purpose of fiction. He was content
	to sacrifice continuity or even credibility as long
	as he could establish a significant moral situation.
	Thus Melville’s romances do not give the reader
(35)	a full understanding of the complete feelings and
	thoughts that motivate actions and events that shape
	fate. Rather, the romances leave unexplained the
	sequence of events and either simplify or obscure
	motives. Again, such simplifications and obscurities
(40)	exist in order to give prominence to the depiction of
	sharply delineated moral values, values derived from
	a character’s purely personal sense of honor, rather
	than, as in a Jamesian novel, from the conventions of
	society.

    In 1938, at the government-convened National Health Conference, organized labor emerged as a major proponent of legislation to guarantee universal health care in the United States. The American Medical Association, representing physicians' interests, argued for preserving physicians' free-market prerogatives. Labor activists countered these arguments by insisting that health care was a fundamental right that should be guaranteed by government programs.

    The labor activists' position represented a departure from the voluntarist view held until 1935 by leaders of the American Federation of labor (AFL), a leading affiliation of labor unions; the voluntarist view stressed workers' right to freedom from government intrusions into their lives and represented national health insurance as a threat to workers' privacy. AFL president Samuel Gompers, presuming to speak for all workers, had positioned the AFL as a leading opponent of the proposals for national health insurance that were advocated beginning in 1915 by the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL), an organization dedicated to the study and reform of labor laws. Gompers' opposition to national health insurance was partly principled, arising from the premise that governments under capitalism invariably served employers', not workers', interests. Gompers feared the probing of government bureaucrats into workers' lives, as well as the possibility that government-mandated health insurance, financed in part by employers, could permit companies to require employee medical examinations that might be used to discharge disabled workers.

    Yet the AFL's voluntarism had accommodated certain exceptions: the AFL had supported government intervention on behalf of injured workers and child laborers. AFL officials drew the line at national health insurance, however, partly out of concern for their own power. The fact that AFL outsiders such as the AALL had taken the most prominent advocacy roles antagonized Gompers. That this reform threatened unionsponsored benefit programs championed by Gompers made national health insurance even more objectionable. Indeed, the AFL leadership did face serious organizational divisions. Many unionists, recognizing that union-run health programs covered only a small fraction of union members and that unions represented only a fraction of the nation's workforce, worked to enact compulsory health insurance in their state legislatures. This activism and the views underlying it came to prevail in the United States labor movement and in 1935 the AFL unequivocally reversed its position on health legislation.