made a lasting impact. Looking back on the Exposition in the autobiograph-
ical Newspaper Days (1991), he contrasts the “dingy city” (Chicago) with the “vast and harmonious collection of perfectly constructed and snowy
buildings,” in which “nothing of either intellectual or artistic import [is]
forgotten.” If anything, his recollections of the White City elevate it even
beyond his opinions in 1893, and he notes that: “Now, here and now, was
heaven – beauty – a paradise for the soul. Here and now were color, light,
the ultimate significance of sound and charm” ( Newspaper Days, 308, 310).
Dreiser’s understanding of the gap between the nation represented at the
Exposition and the realities of daily life for most Americans is unsurprising,
given the traditional equation of self-making and financial success in the
United States during the nineteenth century. It is not, however, an entirely
accurate summary of the White City, since his emphasis on the buildings’
facades, which were made of a plaster of Paris type substance called “staff”
placed over iron and steel structures, largely overlooks the details of what
the buildings contained. As he recalled later, “the general exterior effect
of the buildings far outrival[ed] in appeal, for me at least, anything which
the interior had to offer . . . Mathematics, mechanics, physics, except in
their larger sweeps and conclusions, have always been able to do but one
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thing for me – that is, give me a profound headache.”2 For Dreiser, the
White City’s true significance resides in its external design’s ability to bring a genuinely high culture to the American people, and to suggest forms of
national and individual identity that go beyond the commercial, and open
up the possibility of an aesthetic excellence to match or even surpass the best the old world could offer.
Dreiser is alert to the differences between the White City and what he sees
on the Midway Plaisance. For him, there appears to be a distinction between
the ideals (if not the realities) of modern American identity and the otherness on display outside the gates of the official Exposition, and in one passage he
manages to mark this gap to startling effect:
Some amusing comments on the party [the schoolteachers] are heard. In the
Turkish Bazaar in the Midway Plaisance a Turkish Jew stood with his hand to
his chin watching the approaching crowd, just outside his stand.
“Zee, zee,” he remarked to a neighboring salesman, “at muzzy be a charge
party. Hi! Hi! not? Some religious,” and then he did his very utmost to attract the attention of the members and have them “come buy.”3
The man’s otherness as Turk, Jew, aggressive seller, and speaker of barely
understandable vernacular marks him as very different from the restrained
Christian Americans he is trying to attract, and enables Dreiser to utilize
the foreigner to entertain his readers, and reassure them about their own
civilized state. As such, Dreiser’s account is little different from many other journalistic commentaries, overlooking the fact that the man’s commercial
activities mirror American emphasis on business over culture.
As this example makes clear, Dreiser’s reports capture the ways in which
the ideology of the Exposition mirrored wider assumptions about racial dif-
ference, and about the emergence of the United States as a world power.
Despite anxieties expressed by intellectuals such as Henry Adams, the dom-
inant view at the time pictured a White City representing the near-perfected
state of (white) American society contrasted with the “primitive” cultures
that preceded it, and which were displayed outside its gates in a kind of evo-
lutionary progression acted out in the present. Thus, the New York Times, reporting the opening ceremony, moved from a brief account of the Presiden-tial procession up the Midway Plaisance, during which “Arabs, Egyptians,
Javanese, Nubians, Cingalese, Soudanese, Moors, Chinese, and the inhabi-
tants of every quarter of the globe were grouped on either side of the road-
way, ready to do obedience to the ruler of the great American Nation,” to
observe that the White City “was Athens and Venice and Naples in one, and
all around on every pathway and road, swarming over the bridges, throng-
ing the plazas and colonnades and terraces, 500,000 people were waiting
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breathlessly for the signal to shout the praises of Columbus, discoverer of
the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave.’”4
The evolutionary spacing of the Exposition reflected popular philosophy of
the 1890s, and offered a way to resolve the apparent contradictions between
the utopian ideals of the White City and the discontents that pervaded in the
American nation at a time when immigration, industrialization, economic
crisis, and race and class divisions dominated popular and political discus-
sion. Following the writings of the British social Darwinist Herbert Spencer,
many “universe-of-force” philosophers affirmed, as Ronald E. Martin has
summarized, that “according to the best and most up-to-date science and
philosophy, man and society were automatically good and evolving toward
perfection.”5 The model was particularly convenient and reassuring for de-
fenders of American industrialization and capitalism, since it suggested that
current difficulties were merely local blips in an unerringly upward spiral.
As the Exposition illustrates, the model had a strong racial dimension, and
for many thinkers including the philosopher John Fiske and the novelists
Edith Wharton and Jack London, was deployed to assert Anglo-Saxon cul-
tural and imperial domination, and moral superiority. For Wharton and
London, who both claimed lengthy American ancestry, evolutionary racism
provided a way to differentiate between themselves and the “new” Ameri-
cans arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth
century.
Dreiser’s position as the descendant of more recently arrived German
Catholic migrants meant that his attitude was somewhat different, although
the writings of Spencer also made a huge impact upon him. In his autobiog-
raphy, A Book About Myself (1922), he notes how Spencer’s First Principles
“quite blew me, intellectually, to bits,” and how (in marked contrast to
the general optimism of American universe-of-force philosophy) his reading
“left me numb, my gravest fears as to the unsolvable disorder and bru-
tality of life eternally verified.”6 It is not hard to identify the presence of such pessimistic determinism in Dreiser’s fiction, and Sister Carrie (1900) is packed with examples of the controlling effects of powerful external forces
on insignificant individuals. But whereas London and Wharton, for example,
deploy evolutionary racism to differentiate not only between “white” and
“black,” but also to establish an unbridgeable gap between Anglo-Saxon
and “other,” Dreiser is eager to accommodate a model in which individuals
are able to climb the evolutionary scale. Thus, as my reading of Sister Carrie will demonstrate, most readers of the novel have been able to spot Dreiser’s
“fears” about existence, but have been less responsive to the possibilities for cultural redemption that the novel proposes – possibilities, I will argue, that echo the impact the Exposition made on the author in 1893.
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Before we turn to Sister Carrie, however, there is one final aspect of
Dreiser’s response to the Fair that must be noted. Although Dreiser accepts
the implicit evolutionary ladder on display at the Exposition – with White
City approached via the ethnic exhibits on the Plaisance – he does not com-
ment upon the exclusion of the African American from the possibilities of
modern selfhood. At a moment in American history when mass emigration
from Europe was coupled with the internal migration of huge numbers of
African Americans from the South to the North, Dreiser’s narrative manages
to link ancient Greece, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West circus, and the miracles of
contemporary science, suggesting that mobility between these cultural mark-
ers is possible. In contrast, it highlights the sidelining of African Americans from the Fair’s implicit narrative – a move condemned by Frederick Douglass
as an “intentional slight” to the “eight millions of men of African descent
in this country”7 – with a joke about “the only authorized edition of offi-
cial World’s Fair watermelons,” ( Journalism, 134) through which the seller’s attempts at Americanization are ridiculed by an oxymoronic coupling that
highlights his otherness. The near total absence of African Americans in
Sister Carrie has also, until recently, attracted little comment. Indeed, Jude Davies has observed the extent to which the almost universal whiteness of
the novel’s characters has been “unmarked and unremarked.”8 Thus, while
deploying the Columbian Exposition, and specifically the Ferris wheel, as
a starting point, Philip Fisher reads the novel as quintessentially American
in its narrative of the rise of Carrie and the fall of Hurstwood in a society
without fixed class boundaries. Like other critics of the 1980s, such as June
Howard, Rachel Bowlby, and Walter Benn Michaels, whose imaginative re-
readings did so much to recuperate Dreiser and, more generally, American
literary naturalism, Fisher seems uninterested in this apparent anomaly.9