memoir entitled The Adventures of Mickey Finn and was in need of a sales
canvasser. In exchange for selling at least 120 copies of the book within the
next week, Gissell promised he would see that Dreiser received a tryout as
a reporter on the Globe. ( With the Democratic presidential convention to
be held in Chicago that June, there was a reasonable chance new reporters
t h i s m a t t e r o f r e p o r t i n g
4 8
would be needed.) Since the book concerned Gissell’s days at Hyde Park
High School, Dreiser was to seek out as many as possible of the three hun-
dred graduates in the author’s class with the promise that the book “related
to scenes with which they were all familiar.” Dreiser reluctantly accepted
the challenge from “this little yellow-haired rat of an editor.” He claims in
his autobiography that he met the sales quota that led to his first true news-
paper job at fifteen dollars a week.3
He was initially hired as a reporter only for two weeks, to cover the Dem-
ocratic convention, which was meeting at four Chicago hotels, including
the Palmer House, where Day Allen Willy had stayed during their Christ-
mas escapades in 1889. Dreiser had hardly a clue as to how to carry out his
reportorial duties, claiming his phrenological “bump of politics was not very
large.” His mind, he claimed in looking back on his first involvement in
politics, “was too much concerned with the poetry of life to busy myself
with such minor things as politics.”4 But his youthful curiosity and a little
serendipity led to the discovery that former President Grover Cleveland
would be the nominee over New York governor David Bennett Hill. Ac-
tually, the information was available to the larger newspapers through a news
service the Globe could not aªord, but Dreiser picked it up for his paper in
a chance interview with Supreme Court Justice Melville Weston Fuller,
whom Cleveland had appointed during his first term. Having once been a
newspaperman himself, the judge took pity on the inexperienced reporter.
–
Young Dreiser had a lot to learn about journalism; fortunately for litera-
ture he never learned enough. Some years before, he had tried writing in
the style of Eugene Field, who wrote the popular “Sharps and Flats” col-
umn of whimsical humor and colloquial verse for the Daily News. In a sense,
Field, who is best remembered for his sentimental poem “Little Boy Blue,”
was to literature what Paul Dresser was to music, and Dreiser himself was
suckled on this kind of lowbrow popular culture as he grew up in the small
towns of Indiana. He had even sent a few of his eªorts to the humorist,
hoping—in vain—for his response and possible encouragement. While he
was canvassing all the newspapers for a job, he visited the o‹ces of the News,
where Field was pointed out to him. Young Dreiser was relieved that the
great man could not know he was the one who had sent him “unsolicited
slush,” but in fact it may have been from Field that Dreiser first came to
t h i s m a t t e r o f r e p o r t i n g
4 9
appreciate the literary value of the colloquial dialect that sparkles so
through his short fiction and autobiographical writings.
But at the Globe, Maxwell told him repeatedly, “You’re not to write gen-
eral stuª.” And during the Democratic convention Maxwell complained,
“That’s literature—not news stuª. Did you see any particular man?”5 Still
Dreiser found himself more interested in the sordid conditions than in the
politicians who were supposed to clean them up. He had noticed the grimy
neighborhood between the Chicago River and State Street, passing through
it daily on his way downtown from his room at Ogden Place near Union
Park. (He would later place the fictional Carrie there after she moves in
with Drouet.) The area was dubbed “Cheyenne” because its crime suggested
the lawless western town of Cheyenne, Wyoming. In the poem “At Chey-
enne,” Eugene Field had suggested it would take “Young Lochinvar,” the
romantic hero of Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion, to clean up the Chicago neigh-
borhood. But the budding realist already knew better.
“The belated pedestrian,” Dreiser wrote in the Globe of July 24, “who
goes into the district bounded by State, Van Buren, Sixteenth streets and
the river literally steps into the bedrooms of scores of sleepers, who on hot
nights stretch their weary limbs on the hard pavements.” He described the
manifold nationalities, all struggling indigents, most prominently Greek
and Italian “banana peddlers and organ grinders,” and the streets and in-
credibly overcrowded tenements (“a dozen in a single room”) resounding
“with the babel of tongues endeavoring to speak intelligently the English
of Uncle Sam.” He described how these men and women and their human
litters—fifty families for fifty rooms—squeezed sardine-like into three-story
buildings during the winter and how “the first breath of heat [drove] them,
as water drives rats, from their dens.” He did not shy from including sketches
of drunken men in the streets and casually clad women in the windows,
the domestic violence, the ill-lighted streets and broken pavements.
Throughout “Cheyenne, Haunt of Misery and Crime” can be heard for
the first time that deterministic and yet compassionate narrative voice that
leads us through Dreiser’s greatest works. Here were future Americans, and
this democrat from poverty was implicitly asking how America would ul-
timately accommodate them. It was already too late, he thought, for the
current tenants of Cheyenne, if not their children. In the meantime nature
also ignored their plight. “Over them,” Dreiser wrote of these Chicago poor,
“all the night wind softly breathes and the stars look down in their serene
purity. On they sleep with white faces upturned from the pavement.”6 Even
God was oblivious of their suªering.
t h i s m a t t e r o f r e p o r t i n g
5 0
Already Dreiser was distinguishing himself from the Social Darwinism
of most writers and social philosophers of the 1890s, who fused a moralis-
tic hierarchy onto the “survival of the fittest” model in On the Origin of
Species (1859). The true traits of survival, they held, were anything but the
result of chance and were to be found in the moral will and manners of the
American middle class—that is, white Anglo-American males instead of
the immigrant classes of Irish, Germans, and Italians. These unwashed new-
comers to American society were generally considered inferior. (Consider,
for example, the Irish dentist in Frank Norris’s McTeague [1899], who suc-
cumbs to his hereditary alcoholism when his luck turns sour.) Dreiser, com-
ing himself from “suspicious” German stock, seldom made these socially
constructed distinctions. This diªerence from the Howellsian mode, in
which manners or middle-class culture mattered, was what made Dreiser’s
sterner realism initially unpalatable. In his view, the social world reflected
the cosmic picture in which all were subject to forces beyond their control:
“The young are born blind and deaf to experience and failure. The old
scarcely live long enough or gain su‹cient wisdom or experience to see what
a vast force it is that controls them—what tools and fools they have been.
How truly ridiculous, in the face of great forces of nature, all strutting by
a man or a woman is.”7
Accordingly, in spite of the determinism of Dreiser’s piece on the
Cheyenne neighborhood, he ends it by exhorting “human pity” to “extend
a helping hand.” He wanted the helpless to be helped even though they
might be the flotsam and jetsam of nature’s elimination of the weak. Thus
was born the determinist and the reformer, Dreiser’s lifelong contradiction—
to be simultaneously the observer of nature’s law of survival and the apol-
ogist for its victims. He was “still sni‹ng about . . . the Sermon on the
Mount and the Beatitudes as alleged governing principles” as he entered
the hard-boiled world of journalism. Coming from a religious upbringing
that insisted upon such absolutes as good and evil, right and wrong, he en-
countered everywhere as a journalist a world of vice and corruption. He
worked in it side by side with reporters who were cynical and iconoclastic,
who did not believe in a fixed moral order that, Dreiser had believed, “one
contravened at his peril.”8
Dreiser’s tenure as a Chicago reporter was probably destined from the
first to be short-lived. Once the Democratic convention was gone from the
city, there were more than enough Globe reporters to cover the crime scene
at Cheyenne and other hot spots in this urban mix of immigrants and con
men. Nonetheless, in September and October, he was assigned to report
t h i s m a t t e r o f r e p o r t i n g
5 1
on the city’s fake auction shops where bids were artificially raised to lure in