ful “Aunt Molly” Jackson, a midwife and nurse for the settlement, testified
to the general destitution of the miners and their families, especially their
small children, many of whom suªered from cholera, famine, flux, and
“stomach trouble.” Their food, procured from the company stores, consisted
of “beans and harsh foods” fried in lard. Such fare was the best the Red Cross
could or would supply, she said And it did not give to everyone, clearly not
to members of the National Mine Workers. “The Red Cross is against a
man who is trying to better himself,” she charged. “They are for the oper-
ators, and they want the mines to be going so they won’t give anything to
a man unless he does what the operators want him to.”19 Story after story
infuriated and saddened the man who had come from so little himself.
More than two thousand miners were then on strike, and many of them
crowded around and into the hotel to witness the hearings. The local press
was unsympathetic or apathetic, but there were reporters on hand from the
Associated Press and United Press. The grim stories of the Harlan mine
workers went out over the syndicate wires, tales of soup kitchens being dy-
namited and miners being arrested for criminal syndicalism, an old law
passed in the wake of the Great War and generally no longer enforced be-
cause of its constitutional ambiguity. Locals sympathetic to the coal com-
panies fairly seethed until Herndon Evans, editor of the Pineville Sun, started
asking questions of the interrogator himself. Evans was also head of the lo-
cal Red Cross.
t r a g i c a m e r i c a
3 6 1
“You are a very famous novelist and have written several books,” Evans
noted of the writer, who sat at the end of a long table dressed in a crum-
pled blue suit and bow tie. “Would you kindly tell us what your royalties
amount to?” Also, how much did he earn last year? Dreiser set his lifetime
royalties at $200,000 and his 1931 “salary” at $35,000. How much did he
contribute to charity, Evans asked, perhaps somehow knowing of the writer’s
parsimonious ways. When Dreiser admitted he had contributed nothing,
Evans simply said, “That is all.”20
While the miners present were in awe of Dreiser’s stature and certainly
his earning power, they were apparently not surprised or shocked at his poor
record of giving. Dreiser defended it by comparing individual contribu-
tions to “a patch on a rotten pair of pants that ought to be thrown out. I
believe in a whole new suit.” “Hell,” remarked one miner in an apparent
attempt to translate, “I don’t keer for charity myself. I only want what’s com-
ing to me.” The Dreiser committee then visited mining camps in the area
to get a clearer picture of the horror of life in the Kentucky hills. They heard
the same sad story again and again. “Dreiser,” Cohen remembered, “listened
with grave intensity. . . . Our party had toured the mine camps all day; some
of us were hungry, tired, cold, wanted to go. Not Mr. Dreiser; he stayed to
the last. And when he left, with a hundred or more men and women crowd-
ing around him, wanting to shake his hand, he seemed to have a soft, warm,
giving quality.”21
Things were going nicely in the propaganda war by this time, but the
folks in Pineville were not finished with their “outside agitator.” The mys-
terious Marie Pergaine was waiting for Dreiser upon his return to his ho-
tel. When she accompanied him to his room, local busybodies, tipped oª
by either the hotel clerk or manager, laid toothpicks against the door to de-
termine whether Miss Pergaine remained the night. After the toothpicks
were still standing the next morning, Dreiser was formally charged with
adultery. By this time he had already left for New York, the “crime” only a
misdemeanor he could safely ignore outside Kentucky. But had his repu-
tation, or his mission, been tarnished by the scandal? While still en route
on the train, he issued a statement to the AP that he could not possibly be
guilty of the charge because he was impotent—“so much so that the fact
that I may be seen here or there . . . with an attractive girl or woman means
nothing more than that a friendly and quite moral conversation is being
indulged in.”22
This tongue-in-cheek defense (Helen later vigorously insisted that Dreiser
had been potent until the day he died) had been a feeble attempt to shift
t r a g i c a m e r i c a
3 6 2
the focus. “Now, if I have really succeeded in getting the American mind
oª sex for a moment,” he continued, “I would like to discuss the Harlan
situation and other matters.”23 Once back in New York, Dreiser learned
that he as well as his “committee” had also, like the miners they tried to help,
been indicted on the same flimsy charge of criminal syndicalism. Unlike the
adultery charge, this was an extraditable oªense. All charges, however, stem-
ming from the Harlan adventure were eventually dropped or ignored. But
just as Russia had converted Dreiser to communism, Harlan turned the writer
into a committed foe of the capitalistic establishment.
Dreiser was no conventional communist, of course. His inexorable sense
of individuality kept him from o‹cial party membership for many years.
He told a correspondent a year later: “The Party would not accept me as a
member. . . . while I have found Communism functioning admirably in the
U.S.S.R., I am not at all convinced that its exact method there could be
eªectively transferred to the self-government of the people in the United
States.” He had often used the party, asked its advice, but he had not al-
ways followed it. Communist Party member or not, Dreiser was by now
considered a Red by the FBI, which opened a file on him in the early thir-
ties. The Soviets had quoted and misquoted him in Izvestia. He had been
marked for endorsing in the late twenties the Workers’ International Re-
lief (another “Communist Front”) and joining the International Commit-
tee for Sacco and Vanzetti (interestingly, in spite of his belief that they were
guilty). “Dreiser is intellectual,” a later FBI report noted in its bureaucratic
shorthand as the New Deal got under way, “Communist and member of
numerous Communist subsidiaries and recognizes fact that President Roo-
sevelt has done, as Democrat, what Reds have failed to do under their own
party line-ups, that is, converted U.S. to Socialism.”24
–
Sometime before the end of 1931, Dreiser began a relationship with yet
another young woman who had fallen for him because of his books and
who shortly afterward joined the ranks of his secretaries. Clara Clark, the
twenty-four-year-old daughter of a prominent Quaker family in Philadel-
phia, found Dreiser physically shocking at first, but was drawn by “the
rough, massive force” of his face, “with its dark, leathery skin and the thick
lips continually parted over large, yellowy teeth.” Bored that summer with
upper-middle-class life in the Germantown section of the city, Clara, who
t r a g i c a m e r i c a
3 6 3
hoped to become a novelist, picked up a copy of the recently published
Dawn and found a “kindred spirit” in the author’s way of talking frankly
about the experiences that had pained him. She turned next to a cheap edi-
tion of An American Tragedy, which totally absorbed her. She read it in days.
“When I finished it,” she later wrote, “I slipped on my knees beside my
bed, and wept.” Clara wrote the author a letter in care of his publisher, but
didn’t mail it until September or October. Soon she received an answer, call-
ing her intense, poetic, and aesthetic—the last one of Dreiser’s favorite ad-
jectives at the time—and suggesting she pay him a visit in New York.25
Having heard of Dreiser’s reputation as a womanizer—it was more than
locally known by 1931, really ever since his fame from An American
Tragedy—she didn’t tell her parents at first. More letters arrived, along with
copies of Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, until she finally agreed to meet
their author. As if leaving home for the first time, she finally told her par-
ents and kissed them good-bye. Dressed in a new black fur jacket over a
black dress trimmed with red and a hat with a red feather, Clara boarded
the train to New York. She took a room at the Ansonia (having never en-
tered a hotel lobby alone before) and called Dreiser, who came right down
from his o‹ce quarters on the fourteenth floor. At dinner in a nearby French
restaurant—seven courses and a bottle of red wine—he lied about having
met Stalin while in Russia. He spoke of the hard times she had read about