the author’s name in much smaller letters rolled by in an instant. Bucking
the popular view, the interviewer predicted that Dreiser’s “novels will be
read when most 20th century American fiction is forgotten.”
In December 1940 he used part of the profits from the movie to be based
on Sister Carrie to purchase a Spanish-style home at 1015 North Kings Road
(today replaced by a Spanish-style apartment building ). Southern Califor-
nia in those days was still a reasonably priced place to live, but even so Dreiser
had to pay $20,000 for the modest six-room house on a spacious lot. His
first novel and masterpiece, which had once rendered him almost home-
less, now provided for his last sanctuary. He furnished the new house, only
seven blocks west of his previous residence, with items that had been stored
at Mt. Kisco, including his writing desk made out of Paul’s rosewood pi-
ano. (That year Dreiser lost another brother with the passing of Rome, who
managed in spite of his bad living habits to reach the age of eighty.) After
Iroki’s strange shapes, this house— only the second he ever owned—
seemed more conventionally appointed. Its white stucco was oªset with
awnings of deep orange and its banana palms were encircled with neat flower
beds. As Marguerite Tjader remembered it, the house “was one-storied, ex-
cept for a square tower-room which rose beside a Moorish-style archway,
f a c i n g w e s t
3 8 4
leading to a matching stucco garage.” In the back there was a small pond
shadowed by two avocado trees.5
By now Germany and Russia had signed a nonaggression treaty. This
kept Dreiser’s sentiments vaguely on the side of Germany and against Great
Britain, which he blamed for getting the Americans to fight the Germans
in the last war; it also made him an ally of the America First movement,
spearheaded by Charles Lindbergh. Americans in general had no appetite
for another European war. The first one had been a great disappointment;
certainly it had not been the war—in the words of President Woodrow
Wilson—“to make the world safe for democracy.” High-profile novels such
as Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) and Remarque’s All Quiet on
the Western Front (1929) were decidedly antiwar. What was not addressed,
however, was the fact that the First World War had been left largely
unfinished, with Germany again poised for combat. Yet as long as Ger-
many did not attack his cherished Soviet Union, Dreiser wanted the United
States to continue its isolationist policies. He resented Roosevelt’s “per-
sonal animosity toward Hitler,” and told Mencken, who detested FDR for
his New Deal policies: “I begin to suspect that Hitler is correct. The Pres-
ident may be part Jewish.” While visiting Washington, D.C., that No-
vember he delivered a radio address on behalf of the American Peace Mo-
bilization in which he accused England of conspiring to get Hitler to attack
Russia.6
As Roosevelt tried to prepare the American people for the possibility of
intervention in the war that fall, Dreiser threw together another political
screed swelling with statistics and half-truths (about British atrocities and
the success of the Soviet state). Published in January 1941, America Is Worth
Saving (changed at the last minute from “Is America Worth Saving?” and
partially ghost-written) mainly unleashed all of Dreiser’s pent-up hatred for
the British. As German bombs fell on England, he claimed to see no diªer-
ence between the two countries (“Hitlerdum and Hitlerdee”) and urged that
the United States pay more attention to its own social problems at home.
Like Tragic America, this book was another “long soap-box speech” mainly
inspired by the author’s conversion to communism. Its thesis is best
summed up by the review in the New York Herald Tribune of February 2,
1941. Modern technology has brought the fruits of democracy closer to the
common man than ever before. (This was the “Technocracy” message of
Howard Scott, whose economic theories had fascinated Dreiser since his
days among what Mencken called the “Red ink” fraternity in Greenwich
f a c i n g w e s t
3 8 5
Village.) England with “a branch o‹ce” in America, however, had prevented
this economic revolution by artificially restricting production except in
times of war. “Then, production zooms, war profits pile up, and the in-
nocent millions go to the slaughter. The present war in Europe is primar-
ily a repetition of the last one except that this time the British bungled
things badly at the start when the hoped-for Russo-German conflict failed
to materialize.” The New York Times lamented the “death” of the author
of Sister Carrie and suggested that his latest book oªered aid and comfort
to the enemy.7
Dreiser’s heart was in the right place, but not his head. Ever since Win-
ston Churchill, whom Dreiser met in England on his way back from Rus-
sia, had predicted that Soviet Communism would inevitably fail, he had
been down on the British as natural enemies of the new Russia. He wanted
social justice worldwide, on the scale he imagined the Soviet utopia was al-
ready attaining, and he sincerely came to believe that capitalism (at least in
its current application) was the enemy of democracy. But as the leftist critic
Granville Hicks pointed out in a review that tried its best to be sympathetic,
Dreiser’s position was “simply that British imperialism is even worse than
Hitler fascism and therefore we must not take sides.”8 Behind this Amer-
ica First campaign, for which the book was only the latest American argu-
ment, lay of course a pro-German but not pro-Hitler attitude. Millions of
German-Americans had not forgotten how they had been discriminated
against during the First World War and how afterward Germany had
suªered so under the weight of war reparations demanded by the British
and their allies.
It was this visceral if also subliminal need to avenge the German people
as well as his new-found love of the Soviet Union that led Dreiser to pile
on the insults to Great Britain, so much so that the FBI secretly recom-
mended him for “custodial detention in the event of a national emergency.”9
He lost friends over the book as well. Otto Kyllmann, an old acquaintance
and the head of Constable and Company, Dreiser’s British publisher, was
so aghast at the attack on his country that he wrote two letters of protest
in the summer of 1941. In the first he said he had not read America Is Worth
Saving through, but he had read enough “to horrify me.” “That you of all
people my dear Dreiser,” he continued in the second, “could feel & write
and publish at this time such heartless & callous words about us was just
more than I could bear.”
Dreiser was obviously pained by Kyllmann’s response but not penitent
about his book. He was touched, he said, from “the personal viewpoint,”
f a c i n g w e s t
3 8 6
but confessed that he was now politically a Bolshevik—a “‘Fifth Colum-
nist’ or ‘Red,’ or what you will, for I believe heart and soul in the value and
probable successful outcome of the great Soviet or Communistic system or
experiment.” He was not against the English people, “the English rank and
file,” but only its “Lords and Ladies and financiers” who had brought on
the First World War in order to get Germany to crush the Soviet Union
and its worldwide crusade for communism. Ludicrously, he closed by telling
his ex-friend: “You need not publish any more of my books.” Earlier, Will
Lengel, who was acting as Dreiser’s agent for America Is Worth Saving, won-
dered whether “it is really necessary for you to be so hard on the English
so as to injure your own publishing relations in Great Britain.” Dreiser
replied, “Don’t worry about my English publishers. The war seems to have
finished them.”10
By the time of Kyllmann’s letters, however, the thesis of the book was
already moot, for on June 22 the Germans broke their pact by invading Rus-
sia. Dreiser continued to hate the British aristocrats, telling a correspon-
dent: “I mistrust England as much as I mistrust Hitler.” But he loved the
Russians more and now stood up for the American intervention in Europe.11
Yet Dreiser’s shelf life as a political radical wouldn’t last much longer, at
least not at the same level it had between the bookends of Tragic America
and America Is Worth Saving. In fact, one more incident would pretty much
bring about his retirement. He had been dedicated to this public life since
Russia, even more intensely once he had lost the Nobel Prize and perhaps
given up literature because of it. There was nothing an old friend like Kyll-
mann could say to dissuade him. Neither could the pleading of another old
friend and writer to return to storytelling aªect him. Sherwood Anderson
had died trying on March 8, 1941. Dreiser sent his tribute, which was read