The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

several such conferences, or editorial bull sessions, in which the usually half-

hour remarks by the editors were recorded by Evelyn Light, Dreiser’s cur-

rent secretary. Some were never published, and this one certainly shouldn’t

have been. Dreiser is heard to say that “the world’s quarrel with the Jew is

not that he is inferior, but that he is superior.” After some disagreement

from Nathan and Boyd, Dreiser responds that Jews have been not only dis-

persed but suppressed for nearly two thousand years. His “real quarrel” with

them, he said, was that they were actually “too clever and too dynamic”

for their own good—certainly for the good of the societies they invaded

in what he deemed an almost parasitic fashion. “In other words, tempera-

mentally they are inclined to drift to whatever nation is of promise in their

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time.” He recommended a separate Jewish state rather than their integra-

tion of other countries. Cabell chimed in facetiously at the close of the

“conference” to propose that Jews be given the state of Kansas. “Thereby,

in the first place, we might rid ourselves of Kansas; in the second place, of

the Jews.”33

Hutchins Hapgood, who had known Dreiser since his Village days and

who was partly responsible for the Provincetown Players production of The

Hand of the Potter in 1921, found the piece unsettling and asked the editors

to print his response. He was the author of seven books, including The Spirit

of the Ghetto in 1902, which had sought to challenge the image of the Jew-

ish ghetto as a place only of poverty, immorality, and ignorance, a stereo-

type first brought to the attention of middle-class New York by Jacob Riis

in How the Other Half Lives. 34 Hapgood had become interested in the

Jewish people while working under Lincoln Steªens at the New York Com-

mercial Advertiser in the late 1890s. His depictions of Jewish people, espe-

cially on the lower East Side, attempted to stave oª turn-of-the-century

anti-Semitism by opening cultural channels between Jews and Gentiles in

New York.

The handsome writer, who came from a wealthy family with a consider-

able estate at Hastings on the Hudson, lived in nearby Dobbs Ferry, New

York, with a wife and four children, but he had spent much of his time in

Greenwich Village mingling with other writers. As we have seen, in “Esther

Norn” of A Gallery of Women, Dreiser tells the thinly veiled story of the

artist Mary Pyne, the estranged wife of the poet Harry Kemp and asserts

that she and Hapgood, as “JJ” in the story, had had an aªair. Pyne died in

poverty at age twenty-five, a victim of crippling health problems that culmi-

nated in tuberculosis. According to Dreiser’s scenario, “JJ” did nothing to

help her except to pay her funeral expenses. Like “Rona Murtha,” the sketch

that depicted Arthur Henry in an unfavorable light, this one may have fol-

lowed basic facts (though Hapgood later denied the aªair), but it gave “JJ”

no benefit of the doubt. In the twenties, Hapgood apparently disappeared

into alcoholism until resurfacing in Dreiser’s life in 1932 to ask for his help

in placing a thirty-thousand-word memoir entitled “My Forty Years of

Drink,” already rejected by several publishers. Hapgood had apparently not

yet become aware of how he had been used in A Gallery. At first, Dreiser

seemed to brush oª the request, then had the ever discreet Evelyn Light

apologize, saying that her boss had been busy working on The Stoic. He even-

tually read Hapgood’s manuscript, praised it, and promised to recommend

parts of it to the Spectator, where nothing ever appeared.35

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When Hapgood challenged the editors of the Spectator, they ducked the

issue of anti-Semitism by ignoring his request and passing his letter onto

Dreiser, hoping the two would somehow resolve the matter as between

friends. Hapgood had sought to remind the editors of their obligations to

liberalism, a more broadened concept of democracy then being cultivated

by FDR in his Fireside Chats on the radio. Instead of somehow trying to

placate Hapgood, however, Dreiser walked into a self-constructed firestorm.

He suggested that liberalism was foolish in a society already threatened with

being overrun with too many “types,” whether they be Arabs, Catholics,

Jews, or blacks. Then he singled out Jews as possibly the most threatening

“type,” insisting that they preferred to be white-collar workers rather than

farmers or mechanics (thereby not helping to carry the national workload).

He also quoted unnamed Jews on Jews about their “sharp” practices when

it came to money. And, to buttress his point, he mentioned that several

states were considering a quota on the number of Jewish lawyers. “The Jews

lack, if I read the Pennsylvania Bar Association correctly,” he told Hapgood,

“the fine integrity which at least is endorsed and, to a degree, followed by

the lawyers of other nationalities. At least, that is the charge. Left to sheer

liberalism as you interpret it, they could possess America by sheer num-

bers, their cohesion, their race tastes and, as in the case of the Negro in

South Africa, really overrun the land.”36

This was the very same person—the author of “Nigger Jeª ”—who had

gone to bat for the Scottsboro boys and condemned racial prejudice in the

American South. Hy Kraft, a Jewish Broadway producer and close associ-

ate of Dreiser’s at the time, later characterized the incident as “his anti-

Semitic aberration.” In the Jewish Advocate fifteen years earlier, Dreiser had

boldly gone on record to hail the Jewish people of the Lower East Side as

“essentially artists, transfiguring the commonplace with a glow of hope, and

seeing in the humdrum everyday the stepping-stone to a larger and more

vigorous life.” Indeed, as late as 1925 he had told another journalist almost

the opposite of what he was now telling Hapgood: “I believe, although many

people won’t agree, that the Jews understand and love this country better

than the so-called Anglo-Saxon stock. They sink deep roots here, they ap-

preciate the material opportunities and try to give something in return.”

In spite of his very early anti-Semitism in Chicago (which he acknowl-

edges in Dawn), he had held the Jews in high regard, especially as artists.

The turning point came after he visited the Soviet Union, fell in love with

socialism, and concluded (as the Soviets did) that “Jews are natural-born

traders” who cannot be made amenable to socialism. “Now I do not assert,”

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he told an interviewer in 1929, “that the Jew cannot be happy in Russia. . . .

But just the same while I was in Russia the thought frequently came to me

that because of their rather general instinct for trading and because of Com-

munism’s fatal opposition to that instinct, the Jews must needs be un-

pleasantly aªected by it.” Now some five years later, as he had become com-

pletely enamored of the Soviet experiment, Dreiser apparently had no idea

how irrevocably he was branding himself as a racial conservative, if not a

racist. “In this particular symposium,” he coolly told the now heated Hap-

good, “I did not say anything which should cause an intelligent Jew to quar-

rel with my position.”37 Yet as Hitler’s anti-Semitism campaign got under-

way in 1933, soon after his installation as chancellor, the climate for speaking

critically or abusively about Jews in the United States as a separate entity

was changing almost overnight. It easily set the stage for Hapgood’s response

to the eªect that if Dreiser hadn’t signed the letter, he might have thought

it was “written by a member of the Ku Klux Klan or a representative of

Hitler.” Yet Dreiser had many Jewish friends and was accustomed to speak-

ing frankly to them about their culture without oªense because those he

knew were writers more interested in assimilation.

With his second letter Dreiser merely got himself deeper into the morass.

He insisted on a higher number of Jews in America than Hapgood would

allow, including “half-Jews” and “quarter-Jews” that any census might miss.

Calling now for an international conference to decide whether Jews ought

to establish their own state or blend in with the populations through in-

termarriage, he ignored the contradiction of his earlier statement against

assimilation by saying: “As Shaw urged only recently, why not every Jew-

ish male forced to marry a Gentile female, and every Jewish female a Gen-

tile male? Would not that solve this very vexing question of how the Jew

is to be disposed of among the various races and nations of the world?”38

When Hapgood published this exchange—with Dreiser’s permission, no

less—in the Nation in 1935, it caused immeasurable damage to the novel-

ist’s personal reputation, opprobrium that lasts to this day. By this time Ger-