Union Square appears as a public stage where the promises of wartime patriotism meet the doubts of working people. On Joe Williams’s return to New York City, its recruiting display first offers a bright, official spectacle; after a conversation in a nearby bar, he comes back to find that spectacle dark and diminished. The square’s repeated appearance makes it a compact image of the distance between patriotic appeal and the lives of those asked to support the war.

Setting and Recruiting Display

Joe reaches Union Square on a cold, rainy evening after finding that Janey cannot see him until the next day. Lonely and in need of a drink, he walks through the square, which is lit and crowded around naval recruiting posters and a large wooden battleship model. A young woman dressed as a sailor is speaking about patriotism. The display joins a miniature image of military power to a public appeal for recruits, while the rain and the passing crowd give the scene a transient, unsettled quality.

Working-Class Opposition

When the rain resumes, the crowd disperses, and Joe continues to a nearby ginmill. There he talks with two men from Chicago who condemn wartime propaganda and argue that workers in munitions factories are making shells to kill other workers. They distinguish the small earnings of working people from the much larger profits of war profiteers and invoke revolution in Russia as a possible answer. The bartender warns them that such talk could make people suspect them of being German spies, then admits that speaking that way could cost him his job. The conversation does not take place in the square, but it follows Joe’s encounter with its recruiting spectacle and supplies a sharp counterargument to the patriotism displayed there.

Return and Narrative Significance

After paying for a round with his last greenback and shaking hands with the men, Joe goes back to Union Square. The recruiting speeches are over; the wooden battleship is dark, and a couple of ragged young people are huddled beside the recruiting tent. The shift from bright lights and public persuasion to a dark model and cold, vulnerable figures reverses the square’s earlier appearance without resolving the argument Joe has just heard. Feeling worse rather than buoyed, he descends into the subway and waits for the Brooklyn train. Union Square thus links recruitment, class criticism, and Joe’s own disillusionment in a single brief return.