qualified presidents, in theory if not practice. Franklin Roosevelt, his suc-
cessor in 1932, would fly largely by the seat of his pants into the chaos of
the coming decade, accomplishing with a smile and a handshake what
Hoover could not. Compared with Roosevelt, as one historian has hinted,
Hoover was “a peculiarly artless politician.” He kept hoping that the De-
pression was merely a rather longish downturn in the business cycle, while
Roosevelt sensed that the American people needed some sort of immedi-
ate uplift, both psychological and economic. Ultimately, there was the fear
that America would see its hard times as permanent. More than thirteen
hundred banks closed in 1930, half of them in the last two months of the
year. By the same time, an unprecedented 26,355 business failures had been
recorded.1
The tough times, exacerbated for Dreiser by a grass fire the following year
at Mt. Kisco that consumed one of his Iroki cabins, merely hardened his
growing antagonism for capitalism. He suspected corporations of stealing
from the people while noncommunist labor organizations stood passively
by. In an open letter to the John Reed Club, he stated his belief that the
current economic system in America was “changing into an oligarchical
over-lordship,” comparable to the British aristocracy. Dreiser wasn’t alone
in seeing capitalism in the Depression as a corrupt and worn-out system.
Other artists and intellectuals who supported the communist view of Amer-
ican society included Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, Sidney Hook,
Langston Hughes, and Edmund Wilson.2 Indeed, there was a latent feel-
ing among the general population that the Depression had revealed capi-
talism to be a failed economic system.
Since 1928 Dreiser had been involved, initially because of Ruth Kennell,
with the case of Thomas J. Mooney, a labor agitator imprisoned since 1917
on fraudulent evidence for bombings in San Francisco. In May, while va-
cationing in the West for his health, he visited Mooney in San Quentin.
Interestingly, he privately considered the embattled Mooney more valuable
in jail as a symbol of injustice, though he wrote to California Governor
C. C. Young demanding his release. He was even reported in the San Fran-
cisco Chronicle to have opined that Mooney should, if he was not released,
be forcibly freed by vigilantes.3 By now he was becoming fed up with Amer-
ica, leading him to make intemperate remarks to reporters in interviews
and in Tragic America (1931), a cobbled-together screed against capitalism
in all its forms, as well as against the Catholic Church. The country’s eco-
nomic problems, he argued, could be remedied only through the domi-
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3 5 5
nance of labor and communism. The monograph was eventually banned
from many U.S. libraries, including one of the Carnegie libraries in
Dreiser’s home state, where all his books were not simply banned, but sup-
posedly burned. Its economic “facts” were roundly challenged by review-
ers. When Dreiser indignantly asked Stuart Chase to elaborate on the
“eighteen errors of fact” he had found in the chapter on “Our Banks and
Corporations as Government,” Chase, a popular leftist himself on eco-
nomic matters, replied almost apologetically that he had actually found
“more than forty.” He hastened to express his admiration for Dreiser’s “other
work” and the conviction that in Tragic America the great novelist “had
entered a strange field.”4 Dreiser’s lifelong pessimism about the human con-
dition and its social ramifications had animated all his books since Sister
Carrie, but the trip to Russia had indeed taken his literary gifts into a
strange field.
In the fall of 1930, he was known to be one of two American finalists
for the Nobel Prize in literature, but the award—the first to an American
writer—went (along with a check for $46,000) to his longtime nemesis,
Sinclair Lewis. The bad publicity Dreiser had received over Dorothy Thomp-
son’s plagiarism charges probably hadn’t helped his cause. Furthermore, Lewis
had long cultivated his image with the Swedes, where he was a best seller
(because he satirized America, many thought), while Dreiser’s only book in
translation there, An American Tragedy, had sold but a pitiful 197 copies by
1927. Later, because of arrangements he had made with publishers while
touring Scandinavian countries, there were translations of some of his other
books, but nothing compared to the coverage achieved by Lewis.When Ernest
Boyd’s wife, Madeleine, a literary agent, told Dreiser that giving the prize
to Lewis proved that the Nobel Committee was more interested in politics
than achievement, he waved her oª by saying that he could not “imagine
the prize lessening or improving the mental standing of any serious writer—
writing is, after all, his or her main business.” Generally, Dreiser was stoical
about the decision, though eight years later he expressed his disappoint-
ment at not having won to his Swedish publisher.5
Dreiser, not Lewis, after all, was the “Father of American Realism.” To
his everlasting credit, Lewis acknowledged this fact. In his Nobel Prize ac-
ceptance speech, he singled out Dreiser as the American who had most ad-
vanced the cause of modern letters in the United States: “He has cleared
the trail from Victorian, Howellsian timidity and gentility. . . . Without his
pioneering I doubt that any of us could, unless we liked to be sent to jail,
express life, beauty and terror.” Lewis himself soon began to think Dreiser
t r a g i c a m e r i c a
3 5 6
had better deserved the Prize and as a Prize holder, beginning in 1931, even
nominated him year after year to the Nobel Committee.6
Dreiser suªered another setback in the winter and spring of 1931. Jesse
Lasky, after four years of letting the film version of An American Tragedy
lie fallow, produced a movie in which Clyde was reduced to “a more or less
over-sexed and worthless boy.” In other words, Clyde and not society was
to blame for the tragedy. Initially, Paramount—which because of the tran-
sition to “talkies” now paid Dreiser an additional $55,000 for the sound
rights—had brought Sergei Eisenstein to America to oversee a script, but
the result was too long and too reductively Marxist in its depictions of cap-
italistic America for Hollywood. (As one film critic has remarked, “Dreiser
could not have asked for a more respectful, or understanding director” than
Eisenstein.)7 Instead Lasky turned over the project to the renowned film
director Joseph von Sternberg, who had on occasion “expressed his con-
tempt and dislike” for Dreiser—these are the words of Arthur Hays, who
wrote the letter of complaint on Dreiser’s behalf to Paramount.
On June 26 Hays threatened an injunction unless the picture was changed
to “represent Mr. Dreiser’s work”—which “presented the situation of an or-
dinary but weak youngster who, through the vicissitudes of life, over which
he had little or no control, was gradually forced to one position after an-
other, until he became involved in a great tragedy.”8 Dreiser may have be-
lieved that An American Tragedy was more of an indictment of capitalistic
America after visiting Russia, when in fact it was—like Sister Carrie—as
much of a cosmic complaint as a social one. Rather than showing Clyde as
a victim of cosmic forces, not to mention the social ones, the movie script
focused mainly on the courtroom scenes to the detriment of the material
in Book I of the novel, which narrates Clyde’s initial impressionable life
and its deprivations, which led to his distorted view of the American Dream.
It also excluded the death house scene as “too gruesome to show the Amer-
ican public”—a scene that had proved to be the most riveting in the play
version of An American Tragedy. Lasky claimed that it was too late to make
changes and that his corporation had been unable to locate Dreiser at the
appropriate time.9
Dreiser sued and lost a year later. He had tried to reason with “Hooey-
land,” as he came to refer to Hollywood, even going out there on one of
the earliest transcontinental flights, at Paramount’s expense. The studio
yielded to the extent of adding a few shots of Clyde’s early life. When the
completed film was previewed in New York to a number of Dreiser’s cronies
on June 15, however, it was deemed unworthy, though at least one of them,
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3 5 7
Ernest Boyd, agreed beforehand to condemn the film.10 In deciding against
Dreiser, the judge in the case stated that Paramount “must give considera-
tion to the fact that the great majority of people composing the audience . . .
will be more interested that justice prevail over wrongdoing than that the
inevitability of Clyde’s end clearly appear.” Hollywood, of course, wasn’t
particularly interested in conveying even this social lesson over Dreiser’s de-
terministic argument. When Hollywood was compared unfavorably to the
achievements of foreign filmmakers, Samuel Goldwyn retorted: “There’s