Political Writings

Theodore Dreiser, Jude Davies

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780252090127
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Theodore Dreiser staked his reputation on fearless expression in his fiction, but he never was more outspoken than when writing about American politics, which he did prolifically. Although he is remembered primarily as a novelist, the majority of his twenty-seven books were nonfiction treatises.   To Dreiser, everything was political. His sense for the hype and hypocrisies of politics took shape in reasoned but emphatic ruminations in his fiction and nonfiction on the hopes and disappointments of democracy, the temptations of nationalism and communism, the threat and trumpets of war, and the role of writers in resisting and advancing political ideas.   Spanning a period of American history from the Progressive Era to the advent of the Cold War, this generous volume collects Dreiser's most important political writings from his journalism, broadsides, speeches, private papers, and long out-of-print nonfiction books. Touching on the Great Depression, the New Deal, and both World Wars as well as Soviet Russia and the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, these writings exemplify Dreiser's candor and his penchant for championing the defenseless and railing against corruption.   Positing Dreiser as an essential public intellectual who addressed the most important issues of the first half of the twentieth century, these writings also navigate historical terrain with prescient observations on topics such as religion, civil rights, national responsibility, individual ethics, global relations, and censorship that remain particularly relevant to a contemporary audience. Editor Jude Davies provides historical commentaries that frame these selections in the context of his other writings, particularly his novels.

PART ONE

1895–1910

Historical Commentary

In the decade and a half around the turn of the century, Dreiser addressed political issues in three main ways. As editor of Ev’ry Month from 1895 to 1897 he expressed trenchant criticism of contemporary American society, largely in moralistic and philosophical terms. Ev’ry Month also evaluated various attempts at social improvement on the part of individuals and groups, a focus that Dreiser went on to extend as a freelance writer, and on his return to editorship in 1905. From 1907 to 1910, as editor of the mass-circulation The Delineator, he adopted a “humanitarian editorial policy” that favored a feminist and Progressive agenda.

Ev’ry Month belonged to a wave of cheap illustrated magazines starting publication in the 1890s, spurred by population growth and advances in printing technology, especially the numerous illustrations made viable by cheap halftone engraving. Its original raison d’être was to publicize the songs of Howland, Haviland and Company, in which Dreiser’s brother Paul Dresser was a partner, and was thus notionally aimed at middle-class housewives with access to a piano, though it doubtless also appealed to women aspiring to this status. ¹ Dreiser’s tenure as editor coincided with a severe economic depression that exacerbated political dissensus, setting wealth against labor, farmers against financiers, Southerners and Westerners against the East, Populists against the political establishment, and those who wanted “free silver” to ease the money supply against those who wished to retain the gold standard to protect banks and lenders. He took sides, ranging himself with suffragists, Westerners, farmers, striking garment workers, and immigrants, against centralized wealth, corruption, privilege, and social prejudice.

For his editorials Dreiser adopted a title, “Reflections,” and a persona, signing them “the Prophet”; both signaled a critical distance from which to comment upon contemporary America. The editorial columns habitually opened with a topical or seasonal reference, for example, to the marriages of wealthy Americans to European nobles (December 1895), the bond issue intended to resolve the 1896 financial panic (February and March 1896), upcoming presidential elections (September and November 1896), the true meaning of patriotism (October 1896), Christmas sentiment (December 1896), or the Bradley-Martin Ball (March 1897), and went on to put it into a wider philosophical and historical context. This was then followed by between five and nine commentaries on various topics, in which Dreiser frequently expressed sympathy for many of the marginalized groups of the period and made stinging moral criticism of the wealthy, privileged classes, who, he suggested, had usurped control of the nation’s economy and its political and juridical institutions. “It has been the curse of every age,” he argued, “this centralization of wealth—gathering where it least belongs” (November 1896).² Dreiser offered “a good word” on the “great and sure-to-be-victorious cause” of “woman suffrage” (see 15–17), sympathized with striking garment workers (October 1896), defended immigrants (April 1897), and polemicized about the state of public schools (May and June 1897). He inveighed against what he saw as the intrigues of the Republican Party (October 1895); systematic political corruption (January, April, and July 1896); “the evil of money influence in the courts” (July, November, and December 1896); and, in what would be a long-term concern, corrupt charitable organizations (November 1896). He also picked up on and recast the popular press rhetoric that called for military intervention in support of Cuba’s struggle against Spanish colonial rule (November 1895, April 1896, July 1896, and January 1897).

The “Reflections” column’s moral condemnation of wealth and power often embraced Populist criticism of the power of trusts (April 1896, March 1897), and occasionally employed overtly Populist rhetoric mistrustful of the “silent company” of financiers and capitalists who controlled the money supply (February 1896). Ev’ry Month focused closely on William Jennings Bryan’s 1896 campaign for the presidency on a populist “free silver” platform. In the five months leading up to the election, “the Prophet” evaluated Bryan’s potential to bring about significant change without ever referring to him explicitly, in ways that a politically aware readership (and Dreiser obviously assumed the readership of Ev’ry Month was politically aware) would have easily decoded. Thus, on the eve of Bryan’s triumph in winning the Democratic Party nomination, the July 1896 “Reflections” opened with a meditation on the contradiction between the “ceaseless demand of the good citizen for pure politics” and “politics themselves.” The distinction between reforming the political apparatus and using it in its current state was pertinent to Bryan’s attempt to use the machinery of the Democratic Party in a two-horse presidential race, rather than mounting a third-party challenge. Bryan’s famous oratorical skills—his victory at the Democratic Party convention was widely attributed to his “Cross of Gold” speech—prompted two discussions of oratory as a force in national politics. The September 1896 “Reflections” listed “loud-mouthed oratory” as one of the “huge national nothings” by which the population was diverted from paying attention to graft and fraud closer to home. The following month, however, oratory was considered as a means of inspiring people to action, and the orator “one of those hero-beings in whom the meaning of life finds its highest expression.” This implicit support for Bryan was qualified by the discussion of true patriotism with which Dreiser had begun the column, and in which he concluded that no one in the current crop of politicians could qualify as a true patriot, since the contemporary political scene was dominated by wealth and “the patriot has invariably appeared with no wealth other than that of an abundantly generous nature.” Dreiser opened the November 1896 “Reflections,” the last before the election, with an openly Populist attack on “incompetence, bribery and blackmail” at the state level, “one of the questions not discussed in this campaign.”³ Typically, he was concerned that concentration on a single issue, the money supply, should not detract from the necessity of more sweeping change.

Ev’ry Month’s coverage of social problems explored various means by which positive change could be brought about. “It is to the masses, not to the classes, that the appeal for the reform of the school system must be addressed,” Dreiser argued in November 1896.⁴ Six months later he reflected that the privileged also had a role to play: “One’s duty consists, these days, in arousing a working sympathy among those whom the tide of fortune has elevated, for those whom the undertow of adversity has swept to the lowest depths of the sea of misery.”⁵ Dreiser frequently returned to the topic of charitable work to benefit the urban poor, with an ambivalence characterized by the February 1897 description of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s mission to the Lower East Side. “Although her single efforts are meager in result,” Dreiser writes, “it is still inspiring to see some one trying to do good, be it ever so weakly, for so many do not try at all.”⁶

Several of the “Reflections” intermingled personal experience, feelings, desires, and morals with politics, in ways that anticipate Sister Carrie and subsequent novels. For example, discussion of the garment workers’ strike in October 1896 was embedded in a cautionary tale that began, “To those who are infatuated with the thought of living in a city and of enjoying the so called delights of metropolitan life, the recent strikes in the sweat-shops of New York might furnish a little food for reflection.”⁷ In December 1896 another exemplary story cast a certain Weber, the profligate son of a millionaire, as a latter-day prodigal son, whose “progress … through gilded and glittering resorts, into the asylum and Potter’s Field, must ever arrest the attention of the eye and the mind.”⁸ Cautionary tales such as these treat political issues (strikes, the abuse of wealth and privilege) as materials for narrative in a manner similar to Dreiser’s fiction, evoking urban pleasure and danger, depicting individual lives as spectacles for others, and offering short life-stories as the basis for wider social, philosophical, and moral speculations.

In the four years following his departure from Ev’ry Month in the fall of 1897, Dreiser published over one hundred freelance articles in magazines such as Ainslee’s, Demorest’s, and Cosmopolitan on a tremendous variety of contemporary topics.⁹ In several of these, Dreiser documented the conditions of the urban poor and various attempts to ameliorate such conditions by factory owners, charity workers, political representatives, and lone individuals, whether charitable, as in “A Touch of Human Brotherhood” (Success, March 1902) and “A Doer of the Word” (Ainslee’s, June 1902); on the part of the dispossessed themselves, as in “Christmas in the Tenements” (Harper’s Weekly, 6 December 1902); by political representatives, as in “A Mayor and His People” (Era, June 1903); by officialdom, as in “Our Government and Our Food” (Demorest’s, December 1899) and “Atkinson on National Food Reform” (Success, January 1900); or from the perspective of industrial organization, as in “It Pays to Treat Workers Generously” (Success, September 1899), “The Railroad and the People: A New Educational Policy Now Operating in the West” (Harper’s Monthly, February 1900), and “The Transmigration of the Sweat Shop” (Puritan, July 1900).

Questions of the agency through which positive change might be effected are highlighted in “A Mayor and His People,” which presents what Dreiser calls “the story of an individual which possesses a political and social significance for every citizen of the United States.”¹⁰ Based on the career of Thomas P. Taylor, a reforming mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut, from 1897 to 1899, the article describes the mayor’s initial success in fighting municipal corruption and his subsequent defeat by forces of the railroad in combination with the political establishment. Taylor’s story was important enough to Dreiser for him to rework it for the 1919 collection Twelve Men, where he reports the ex-mayor’s response to electoral defeat in the following terms: “What has happened in my case is that, for the present, anyhow, I have come up against a strong corporation, stronger than I am. What I need to do is to go out somewhere and get some more strength in some way, it doesn’t matter much how. People are not so much interested in me or you, or your or my ideals in their behalf, as they are in strength, an interesting spectacle.”¹¹ An investigation into the possibilities for human agency and solidarity in the face of such spectacular, materialistic, and individualistic social relations informs the spectrum of Dreiser’s output at this time. Questions of the individual’s capacity to change society were paramount in his documentary reportage, such as “Curious Shifts of the Poor” (1899) and “The Tenement Toilers” (1902), and the philosophical, autobiographical, and political hybrid “The Toil of the Laborer” (1913, see 17–25). One form of ameliorative action was undertaken by the charitable individual known as the “Captain,” a man who each evening collected donations on New York’s Broadway to fund beds for the homeless. In some ways the epitome of Dreiser’s ideal of charitable work, the Captain was first described in a magazine article, “Curious Shifts of the Poor” (Demorest’s, November 1899), then in the famous depiction of urban poverty in the latter stages of Sister Carrie, and again in “A Touch of Human Brotherhood,” which appeared in Orison Swett Marden’s Success magazine in 1902. Here and in several more of the thirty pieces he contributed to Success, Dreiser enlarged the scope of the individualistic ideology promoted by Marden—essentially the celebration of powerful individuals and advice on how readers might emulate them—to include examples of charity and industrial cooperation that emphasized social solidarity. Another Success piece from 1902, “The Tenement Toilers,” described visits, alongside an official, to an immigrant home where garment work is being done under illegal conditions, and to the small factory run by the contractor who had given out the work. “The Tenement Toilers” and “Curious Shifts of the Poor” came to the same conclusion: that the existence of poverty was a symptom of a wider social malaise, a false belief in the power of money. While their form, tone, and content echoed Jacob Riis’s 1890 exposé How the Other Half Lives (Dreiser would later enlist Riis as a contributor to The Delineator), this sweeping diagnosis of social ills sounded a different note than Riis’s campaigns for specific reforms.

Between 1902 and 1913 Dreiser wrote numerous city sketches and short stories depicting life in New York’s poorest districts. His observations of urban poverty regularly provided evidence for some moral or philosophical point, lesson, or comment, which in many cases is critical of some aspect of contemporary society. Dreiser called explicitly for change in “The Cradle of Tears” (1904), a short sketch describing the crib at the New York Foundling Hospital, into which women would place the human fruits of unwanted pregnancies. The story closes:

Still, the tragedy repeats itself, and year after year and day after day the unlocked door is opened and dethroned virtue enters—the victim of ignorance and passion and affection—and a child is robbed of a home.

I think there is a significant though concealed thought here, for nature in thus repeating a fact day after day and year after year raises a significant question. We are so dull. Sometimes it requires ten thousand or ten million repetitions to make us understand. “Here is a condition. What will you do about it? Here is a condition. What will you do about it? Here is a condition. What will you do about it?” That is the question each tragedy propounds, and finally we wake and listen. Then slowly some better way is discovered, some theory developed. We find often that there is an answer to some questions, at least if we have to remake ourselves, society, the face of the world, to get it.¹²

This concern for the welfare of destitute children, and the same kind of sentimental appeal for reform, would be features of Dreiser’s editorship of The Delineator later in the decade.

Other sketches touched upon issues of economic inequality, social solidarity, and alienation. “The Man Who Bakes Your Bread” and “The Silent Worker” (both written in the mid-1900s and, like several others, published a few years later in the Sunday magazine of the socialist New York Call newspaper) depict workers whose labor was often invisible to middle-class Americans yet was crucial to everyday life. The short story “The Mighty Burke” (McClure’s, May 1911) describes an Irish section foreman who initially seems to bully the Italian workers set under him, but who is revealed as heroic when, after a building collapses, he sacrifices himself for their sake. A 1903 manuscript bemoaned the results of “our modern congestion in cities,” where not only “is the whole energy of our lives turned into a miserable struggle for the unattainable, namely, the uninterrupted and complete gratification of our desires, but our hearts are soured and our natures warped by the grimness of the struggle.”¹³ Warming to the theme of social alienation, Dreiser continues as follows:

The effect of such an unn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Editorial Note
• Part One: 1895–1910
• Part Two: 1911–1928
• Part Three: 1929–1937
• Part Four: 1938–1945
• Index