The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

other great papers at one and the same time.” Dreiser didn’t know it when

he arrived in St. Louis, but McCullagh came from an even poorer back-

ground and bigger family than his own. Born in Dublin in 1842 as one of

sixteen children, McCullagh had immigrated to the United States at age

eleven. By the time he was sixteen, he had settled in St. Louis and within

a year won a job on the St. Louis Democrat. He distinguished himself with

his reporting during the Civil War, and after the war, when the Democrat

merged with the Globe, he rose to the position of editor, a job he held un-

til his death by probable suicide in 1896. (A heavy cigar smoker who be-

came chronically asthmatic, he was said to have either fallen or thrown him-

self from his third-story sickroom.) The editor had a genius for instigating

news and political debates, and was a crusader against gambling and the

sale of alcoholic beverages. He anticipated the “yellow journalism” of the

1890s that Joseph Pulitzer had taken to New York from St. Louis, but he

didn’t always approve of its applications. He was neither exactly for labor

nor against it, though he usually opposed strikes.17

The Globe-Democrat consisted partly of out-of-town news, stories from

around the nation with a smattering of international reports. McCullagh’s

editorial columns were made up of a series of short one- and two-sentence

paragraphs on various topics, which were pointedly and often sarcastically

argued. Full of advertising, the daily issues of the paper ran to thirty-six

pages; on Sunday there were three diªerent sections. It published features

on spiritualism almost daily, a subject that continued to grasp the national

and international imagination throughout the 1890s. There was a regular

weekly column on Germany entitled “From the Fatherland.” The newspa-

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per also ran columns of exhaustive facts on diªerent places and subjects.

On January 15, 1893, there is one on physiognomy, in which “very large,

thick lips are a sign of sensuality,” and “blue eyes belong to people of an

enthusiastic turn of mind.” There were approving stories about ex-rabbis

converting Jews to Christianity and arguments aimed at the lower immi-

grant classes in which man was disgraced by his “animal functions” only

when they “are turned to riot, are perverted or exaggerated and made

monstrous.”18

Stories about lynchings in the neighboring Southern states were also

common—and would later inspire Dreiser’s short story “Nigger Jeª,” in

which a cub reporter witnesses a lynching and then visits the condemned

man’s mother. In one report dispatched to the Globe-Democrat about the

lynching of a black man accused of raping and murdering an eight-year-

old girl in Paris, Texas, the condemned man foolishly returns to the town

after his escape “looking for his mother.” Though the details in general do

not match closely those in Dreiser’s short story, the horrible vigilante ac-

tion was reported vividly enough to make a strong impression on any reader,

especially one as young as Dreiser with his emerging sympathy for the im-

poverished perpetrators of crime, including American blacks in the Jim

Crow era. According to the dispatches, two thousand people jeered and

cheered as the dead girl’s father, brother, and two uncles took turns shov-

ing red-hot irons under the feet of the accused who was pinioned to a stake.

Afterward, they thrust the irons into the man’s eyes and ears and finally

burned him at the stake. The incident was reported in newspapers around

the country, and the governor of Texas, James S. Hogg, demanded (in vain)

the arrest and conviction of the active members of the lynch mob.19

By the time Dreiser met the already overweight and asthmatic McCul-

lagh, the editor was seldom absent from his sedentary post. The only other

chair in his small o‹ce, presumably for guests, was always piled high with

newspapers and editorial copy. As Dreiser stood awkwardly amidst the o‹ce

debris on his first day on the job, he felt discouraged by McCullagh’s dis-

missive welcome: “‘Um, yuss! Um, yuss,’ was all he deigned after I had given

my name and the fact that he had telegraphed for me,” he remembered in

Newspaper Days. “‘See Mr. Mitchell in the city room—the city editor. Your

salary will be—um—um—twenty dollars to begin with’ (he was chewing

a cigar and mumbled his words), and he turned to his papers.” To top oª

McCullagh’s disappointing welcome, Tobias Mitchell, the city editor, sent

Dreiser out on the traditional cub reporter initiation, to report the news

from a vacant lot.20

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For the first time Dreiser was living wholly on his own, not across town

from family members now but in a diªerent city three hundred miles away.

He found a room (“It was a hall bedroom— one of a long series that I was

to occupy”) on Pine Street around the corner from the newspaper build-

ing, whose o‹ces were on the sixth floor. He remembered the first weeks as

the loneliest he had ever experienced. In Chicago he had enjoyed friends and

family; now he had not even a girlfriend. He began to regret his behavior

toward Lois and thought of writing her but then had second thoughts that

the renewed relationship would suggest marriage and its elusive twin, fidel-

ity, two fugitive states throughout Dreiser’s adult life.

–

His regular assignment for the Globe-Democrat became the police station

and criminal court—his specialty, as it turned out, throughout his news-

paper days. To Dreiser, the courtroom (as he would ultimately suggest in

An American Tragedy) was the last place the poor and uneducated were likely

to receive justice in an imperfect world. “By degrees” he made friends with

all the staª at the paper, including one unidentified African-American. One

of his colleagues, Bob Hazard, had written a novel after the example of Émile

Zola, the father of French naturalism. Since it told the “truth” about life in

all its sordid detail, Hazard was certain it couldn’t be published in Amer-

ica. Yet Hazard’s ambition sparked Dreiser’s own interest in creative writ-

ing, though he initially hoped this would manifest itself in playwriting.

One day he wandered into the newspaper’s art department and met Peter

McCord, an illustrator who was to become one of his best friends. “Nearly

every turning point in my career,” Dreiser noted in Newspaper Days, “has

been signalized by my meeting up with some man—not woman— of great

force.”21 A first-generation American and a Catholic like Dreiser, this St.

Louis native had lapsed in his faith but had not given it up completely. An-

other close companion from the paper was Dick Wood, also an illustrator,

whose talents were inferior to McCord’s. At first, Wood seemed to resent

Dreiser’s intrusion into his own friendship with McCord, but gradually, they

became a trio, meeting often in Wood’s “so-called ‘studio,’” and dreaming

of careers as professional artists and writers. Dreiser was intrigued by the

semi-bohemian life the two illustrators appeared to lead, and before he knew

it, he was writing poetry for the first time.

Dreiser’s break on the Chicago Daily Globe had been at the Democratic

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convention of 1892. On the Globe-Democrat he claims to have been the first

reporter on the scene at a horrible train mishap near Alton, Illinois, about

twenty-five miles north of St. Louis. Train wrecks were commonplace in

the late nineteenth century because cars ran in diªerent directions on the

same track and depended on the alertness of switchmen, who were often

poorly trained and usually only part-time employees. One day when

Dreiser was the first to arrive at the editorial room, word reached him of

this latest catastrophe. With the city editor absent from the o‹ce, he said

he took it upon himself to rush to the scene and try to scoop the story,

which was actually only half played out by the time he (or at least some-

one from the Globe-Democrat) reached Alton Junction. The collision had

involved oil-tank cars, which after being pushed oª the tracks continued

to give oª fire and smoke until they exploded, throwing debris for hun-

dreds of yards in all directions.

Dreiser says he was about fifteen hundred feet away when the tanks ex-

ploded. Many more people were injured in this phase of the disaster, es-

pecially the curious who had come out of their houses in neighboring Wann.

“I saw dashing toward me,” he recalled in his autobiography, “a man whose

face I could not make out clearly, for at times it was partially covered by

his hands.” The victim was on fire and flailing his hands in the air when he