c e l e b r i t y
3 3 4
his son will become. Aileen Butler’s character also becomes more forceful
than the merely headstrong girl of the 1912 edition. Dreiser streamlined the
novel by collapsing much of its early dialogue into the narrative and by cut-
ting down his characteristic repetition. The determinism, while still in place,
becomes less explicit.18 With the bullish market on Wall Street that year,
the sky seemed the limit to human endeavor. That year Babe Ruth hit sixty
home runs, and Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic.
But the story remained more relevant for 1912 than for 1927. Then the
moguls of the 1890s had still commanded interest; now everybody seemed
to be getting rich. Yet even though The Financier of 1927 went unreviewed
by most major newspapers and magazines, it sold a reasonable number of
copies (more than its predecessor), probably because of the drawing power
of the name of the author of An American Tragedy. 19 That fame was also
helped when Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry (1927) was banned in Boston in
April under a previously untested obscenity law against “Literature mani-
festly tending to corrupt the morals of youth.” Donald Friede, who had
joined Boni & Liveright as an assistant editor and was now a senior vice
president, decided to test the ban by oªering to sell a Boston police lieu-
tenant a copy of An American Tragedy, for which he was promptly arrested.
Friede was a figure as colorful as Liveright. The son of a Russian immigrant
who had represented the Ford Motor Company in Czarist Russia, he grew
up rich, got himself expelled from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and mar-
ried six times during a successful career as a publishing insider who repre-
sented not only Dreiser but Ernest Hemingway, MacKinlay Kantor, and
others. But even though Friede had the counsel of Clarence Darrow, he lost
the obscenity case and was fined a hundred dollars. The main charge against
the novel was that it invited young people to learn birth control methods.20
An American Tragedy was eªectively banned from the New England cap-
ital for the next two years (until a successful legal appeal), but that only
served to stimulate sales. In fact, the book had not even been targeted by
the Boston Watch and Ward Society until Friede became its “self-appointed
scapegoat.” In May, as the money kept coming in, Dreiser bought himself
a country seat in Westchester County, New York, where his longtime friend
Joseph G. Robin had an estate.21 He called the thirty-six acre property over-
looking Croton Lake “Iroki,” a variation of the Japanese word “iroke,” mean-
ing “beauty.” It was about three miles from Mt. Kisco, New York, which
could be reached from Manhattan by automobile in about an hour and
fifteen minutes as well as by train. The property had been a hunting lodge,
but Dreiser soon poured money into its expansion, though he eventually
c e l e b r i t y
3 3 5
came to regret it. He enlarged the cabin into a main house that had com-
fortable living areas and a large workroom downstairs. He also erected a
small guest house. Both had modern plumbing and were constructed of
bark shingle siding and roofing. Some remarked that the two structures
looked like something out of “Hansel and Gretel” with its gingerbread dé-
cor. Additionally, there were two smaller cottages without indoor facilities.22
That summer Rome resurfaced. As noted earlier, Dreiser learned that his
second-eldest brother was living quietly in a residential hotel on South Peo-
ria Street in Chicago. At sixty-seven and in delicate health after a lifetime
of drinking and kicking about the country, Rome was now content to
smoke (cigarettes, cigars, and a pipe) in his forty-cent-a-day room and live
on a small expense account, which Dreiser soon provided. His expenses
for September 1927 totaled $46.10, including $5.50 for two tickets to see
An American Tragedy at the Garrick Theater and sixty cents for half a dozen
handkerchiefs (for all we know, the handkerchief rolling may have been a
family tradition). He would later rejoin Theo and his sister Mame on a
visit to Iroki, but not before he broke his arm in two places after being run
over by an indigent truck driver in 1929.23 Although Rome may have re-
mained in Chicago, most of the surviving Dreiser siblings had become New
Yorkers.
New York City was now, and had been for a long time past, home for
the American writer who had recorded the swarm of immigrants into the
great metropolis. No longer a Hoosier and a Catholic, Dreiser found Amer-
ica’s identity along with his own in this city, “My City,” as he would call it
in a future publication. Although always a critic of American society, he
identified himself as an American first and last. His father had come from
Germany, not Dreiser, who felt himself a stranger in the Fatherland. What
he most valued about America was the freedom it oªered to the talented
individual to develop to the benefit not only of himself but of the society
at large. He took pride in the unselfish work of scientists and even Amer-
ican financiers who had built up American industry (and America) and now,
he guessed, paid up to 50 percent of their earnings in federal income tax.24
So it was as an individualist with a social conscience that Dreiser in the fall
of 1927 accepted an invitation to visit the Soviet Union on the tenth an-
niversary of its Bolshevik Revolution.
Dreiser was one of hundreds of famous intellectuals around the world
to be invited to Moscow for the week-long celebration of the start of the
Revolution of November 7, 1917, but perhaps the only one oªered an ex-
tended stay at Soviet expense in order to tour some of the provinces of the
c e l e b r i t y
3 3 6
new Russia. At the time, the United States had not yet recognized the So-
viet Union diplomatically. Moreover, many prewar leftists who had preached
rebellion at home were now disenchanted with the Leninist experiment,
which though still in its own idealistic, pre-Stalinist state of producing a
workers’ utopia, insisted on exporting the socialist overthrow of govern-
ments around the world. Two prominent American dissenters were Emma
Goldman (as mentioned above) and Max Eastman, who vented his disap-
pointment in the Socialist experiment in a book entitled Since Lenin Died
(1925).25 Anyone who came to approve of that experiment by 1927, when
Stalin had already forced Trotsky into exile in Siberia, had to see the eco-
nomic upheaval as, ironically, religious. In spite of its materialistic rule over
the churches, the Soviet Union, as John Dewey noted during his visit to
the celebration, presented “a widespread and moving religious reality. . . .
I [had] associated the idea of Soviet Communism, as a religion, too much
with intellectual theology, the body of Marxian dogmas, with its professed
economic materialism, and too little with a moving aspiration and devo-
tion.” He was convinced following his visit to Russia that its new direction
was possessed of “the moving spirit and force of primitive Christianity.”26
In a manner of speaking, so was Dreiser. His seventy-seven-day “look” at
Russia would change his life.
–
It all began on October 3, when Arthur Pell, the attorney and treasurer for
Boni & Liveright, told him that “some representative of the Soviet Russian
government” was seeking to oªer him a free trip to Russia in order that he
might see what good had been achieved by the Soviets in the decade since
the October Revolution. A week later he met with F. G. Biedenkapp, ex-
ecutive secretary of the International Workers’ Aid, “after its fashion,”
Dreiser noted in his diary, “a Russian Red Cross” to aid workers politically
in foreign countries. Although he would have to badger the Soviets at the
end of his visit, all his expenses were ultimately paid. And even though he
was, as he announced himself in the book about his trip, “an incorrigible
individualist,” he was free to choose his own itinerary, ask any questions he
desired, have an interpreter wherever he went, and write—if he liked—an
unfavorable book about the country, or simply no book at all.27
Helen wanted to accompany him (so that he might not “fall in love with
one of those Russian girls and get yourself all tangled up again”), but Dreiser
c e l e b r i t y
3 3 7
insisted on going alone. He was already tangled up with several women at
home. One of them, identified only as “B——” in Dreiser’s Russian diary,
wrote him a series of sexually suggestive letters “one of which I am to read
on ship board each day.” Other current flames were Esther McCoy, the Uni-
versity of Michigan graduate who had relocated to New York to become an-
other of his researchers and typists; Louise Campbell, whom he had known