too much education in the foreign celluloids. Americans don’t want to go
to the theater to be educated. When they want that they go to schools.”11
The stakes were high here, as approximately four-fifths of the American
people in the early 1930s went to a movie theater once a week.
Dawn, the first volume of his autobiography written so many years ear-
lier and then held back for fear it would be too embarrassing to family mem-
bers, finally appeared in 1931—almost a decade after the appearance of the
“second” volume, A Book About Myself. In a way, the appearance of this
early part of Dreiser’s history may have made up for the absence of Clyde’s
youth in the Paramount film. If Dreiser’s readers in the 1930s had begun to
wonder at the author’s increasing activity as a social radical, Dawn told them
of the early, Clyde-like poverty that had first fired these passions, especially
when it came to his endorsement of communism. That March he told an-
other Mooney—James D., president of the Export Division of General Mo-
tors whose Onward Industry! (1931) he curiously admired—that the “solu-
tion for the di‹culties of the world, and particularly those in America, is
Communism.”12 His losses from the stock market crash, of course, hadn’t
done anything to maintain his tolerance for capitalism.
Five days later, on March 19, the irascible author slapped Sinclair Lewis
(twice) for accusing him, once again, of having plagiarized Dorothy
Thompson’s book on Russia. Lewis made the accusation publicly at a din-
ner in honor of a Russian writer at the Metropolitan Club when he point-
edly refused to take the podium in the presence of the plagiarist as well as
“two sage critics” (Heywood Broun and Arthur Brisbane) who had objected
to his receiving the Nobel Prize. According to one eyewitness, “later in the
evening while Lewis and Dreiser were sitting together talking privately,
Dreiser suddenly slapped Lewis’s face. It was a dinner attended by thirty or
forty people and there were long stories about it in the papers the follow-
ing day.” One report mirthfully declared that Lewis’s cheek had been
buªeted by the “hand of the potter.” Dreiser was “big, heavy, quite strong,”
Wharton Esherick later remembered. “You wouldn’t want to fuss with him.”
t r a g i c a m e r i c a
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Lewis, who had been drinking that evening, may have called Dreiser a pla-
giarist more in response to a lingering rumor that Dreiser and Dorothy
Thompson had slept together while in Russia than the idea that he had
stolen her words.13
–
Dreiser was an obstinate man. Once he set his mind to something, noth-
ing could change it. As an adult, he also seems never to have admitted either
regret or embarrassment over his actions, no matter how ridiculous or
wrong-headed some of them might seem today. As he had told Marguerite
Tjader Harris, now another of his intimate companions, he wanted to do
something other than write novels.14 His energy would go strictly to social
causes, no matter how far afield they would take him from his life in liter-
ature or how unflatteringly they might cast him in the public eye. One of
the first was the notorious case of the Scottsboro Boys. Nine black youths
accused of raping two women, later regarded as prostitutes, were convicted
in Alabama that spring. After a short trial, eight were sentenced to death
and the ninth, only thirteen years old, was given life imprisonment. Dreiser,
along with Lincoln Steªens, publicized the outrage. Other protesters in-
cluded the NAACP, the American Communist Party in the form of the
National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, Clarence Dar-
row, Burton Rascoe, and John Dos Passos.
“The State of Alabama has now set July 10th as the date for the judicial
massacre of eight children,” Dreiser wrote in an open letter in May. He was
appealing for funds for a new trial, which was finally granted after several
delays in the sentencing. Ultimately, the Scottsboro defendants were tried
four times in all, the last trial in 1936 resulting in the acquittal of four of
the accused. Dreiser may have helped here. In a pamphlet entitled Mr. Pres-
ident: Free the Scottsboro Boys, sponsored by the Communist Party in 1934,
he appealed directly to President Roosevelt. The case was in its fourth year,
and two electrocutions were still scheduled. Dreiser was following an
American literary tradition, going back at least to Ralph Waldo Emerson,
who in 1838 protested to President Martin Van Buren about the involun-
tary removal of the Cherokee Indians from their gold-rich lands in Geor-
gia to the territory of Oklahoma, resulting in the infamous “Trail of Tears.”
The Scottsboro case has taken a similar place in American history and lore.
Dreiser likened the planned executions to “judicial lynchings,” and was no
t r a g i c a m e r i c a
3 5 9
doubt reminded again of the lynching he had witnessed outside St. Louis.
In a letter to the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of
Lynching, he wrote: “The whole Southern attitude toward the Negro has
become a national ill.”15
That summer he went to Pittsburgh with William Z. Foster, the Com-
munist Party’s candidate for president in 1932, and Joseph Pass, who had
been active in the party’s activities in the South. The Communist-backed
National Mine Workers had challenged the United Mine Workers, an a‹li-
ate of the American Federation of Labor, in organizing attempts in Penn-
sylvania. Violence followed in one of the nearby mining towns. At first
Dreiser tried to remain neutral between these two labor groups, but after
visiting, by his own count, fifteen mines where he interviewed miners and
their wives and returning to New York, he publicly sided with the NMW,
saying the AF of L was in cahoots with the big corporations and discrim-
inated against minorities and immigrants.16 The Pittsburgh venture, how-
ever, was merely a dress rehearsal for Dreiser’s much more publicized and
ultimately embarrassing encounter with the coal miners’ strikes in Harlan
County, Kentucky, in November. Here Dreiser fell into what became known
in the national press as the “toothpick trap.”
All during the 1920s coal miners in Harlan, Bell, and Knox counties had
been fighting for higher wages and safer working conditions. A “mine war”
broke out in the fall of 1931 in Harlan County in which miners were shot
or roughed up for holding “free speech” meetings and trying to become
members of the National Mine Workers. In New York the International
Labor Defense, later dubbed a “Communist Front” by the FBI and the press,
asked Dreiser, as a prominent American friendly to the Communist cause,
if he would organize a committee and look into the matter. Just coming
oª the Pittsburgh strike, he might have declined. It was clearly dangerous
ground, especially for pro-labor outsiders. But he had seen such labor atroc-
ities since his newspaper days in Pittsburgh. Neither his sympathies nor his
nerve ever flagged when it came to the average laborer beaten down by the
system. “I was early drawn into this sort of thing,” he later wrote, “and as
early, of course, witnessed the immense injustice which property in Amer-
ica has not only sought to but has succeeded in inflicting on labor.”17 Dreiser
originally sought to gather together a blue-ribbon committee of prominent
Americans, but no doubt because of his Communist Party a‹liations his
invitations were unanimously declined by newspaper editors, college pres-
idents, and even the future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, then
on the Harvard Law School Faculty.
t r a g i c a m e r i c a
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“Having thus failed to interest the representative Americans,” Dreiser told
Lester Cohen, a Liveright author whom he had known for over twenty years
and who accompanied him to Kentucky, “we are now reduced to writers.”
Of the twenty he asked, six accepted, including Dos Passos, whose labor
chronicles in the trilogy U.S.A. (1938) were no doubt influenced by the ex-
perience. The group registered in the Continental Hotel in Pineville. Dreiser
gave interviews to the press and called the attention of local authorities un-
der the control of the mine owners to his bold errand into the Kentucky
wilderness. He did not go out of his way, however, to advertise the fact that
he had brought along a young woman, Marie Pergaine, whom Cohen had
never seen among the various secretaries Dreiser employed in his latest o‹ce
at the Hotel Ansonia at Broadway and Seventy-Third Street.18
The next day the “Dreiser Committee” set up court in the Lewallen Ho-
tel to hear out the miners. Transcripts of these proceedings, edited by Dos
Passos with an introduction by Dreiser, were eventually published in Har-
lan Miners Speak (1932), a collection of essays by the Harlan pilgrims for
the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. The color-