passed around the o‹ce, Hazard having already done the job once. At the
time, the job of drama critic was not considered an important post by news-
papers. Following the Civil War, local acting troupes had given way to tour-
ing companies that followed the spread of railroads. And with this change,
American drama—still in its fledgling state before the twentieth century—
became big business in which melodramas, society plays, and farce-come-
dies predominated. By the mid-1890’s, Century Magazine bitterly lamented
that “Tragedy, high comedy, the historical and romantic drama have been
virtually banished from the state, or find few worthy interpreters, and have
been replaced to a large extent by worthless melodramas, the extravagant
buªooneries of so-called farce-comedies, or the feverish and unwholesome
t h i s m a t t e r o f r e p o r t i n g
6 1
society play, in which the most vicious topics are discussed openly under
the pretense of solving problems.”29
Dreiser, as he readily confessed in Newspaper Days, hadn’t known the
diªerence. The closest he had probably ever come to a stage by the 1890s
was seeing his brother Paul perform in burlesque shows in Evansville and
Chicago. Where there was respectable drama, it favored old standbys of the
last forty years—dramatizations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur, or Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle.”
Dreiser saw the beloved actor Joseph Jeªerson star in the last, which played
in St. Louis during the week of December 12, 1892. Another play making
the popular rounds was Under the Gaslight by Augustin Daly. Daly, with
his real-life settings and mushy plots, became the father, or at least grand-
father, of modern American drama.30 (The play, which portrays life in New
York City, is the same one in which Carrie Meeber first performs in Sister
Carrie. )
Emboldened by his success with the train accident, Dreiser went over the
city editor’s head to ask for the job. This would come back to haunt him,
but he couldn’t conceal his ultimate dislike for Tobias Mitchell (as he could
not throughout his life for anybody he disliked). He imagined he was now
McCullagh’s protégé and so approached the cigar-chewing editor directly.
Characteristically succinct and to the point, the great editor told him, “Very
well. You’re dramatic editor. Tell Mr. Mitchell to let you be it.” According
to Dreiser’s account, he got the job at the end of January 1893. He reviewed
not only plays but individual performances, such as that of “Black Patti,”
or Sissieretta Jones, whose popular singing had made her a star in Europe.
In his review of April 1, Dreiser may have irritated the largely Southern sen-
sibilities of his St. Louis readers with his admiration for the black soprano
by lavishly proclaiming that her “singing reminds one of the beauty of na-
ture and brings back visions of the still, glassy water and soft swaying
branches of some drowsy nook in summer time.” At any rate, as he re-
members it in his autobiography, he was laughed at by his colleagues at the
Globe-Democrat, and McCullagh, as editor of the paper, became the target
of ridicule from the Republic. 31
This generosity toward a black performer probably didn’t help him at
the Globe-Democrat, but what hurt him more directly is that Mitchell, an-
noyed at how Dreiser had gone around him to get the dramatic assignment,
kept piling on other assignments as if Dreiser weren’t now doing that job.
As it was, with more than one troupe of actors appearing in the city at the
same time, there already wasn’t enough time for Dreiser to see an entire
t h i s m a t t e r o f r e p o r t i n g
6 2
show. He had to rely—as was the common practice among newspapers in
those days— on advance notices and plot summaries for his reviews. And
then one night Mitchell struck his fatal blow.
On the last Saturday night in April, when all the St. Louis theaters were
booked, Mitchell sent him on what was essentially another “vacant lot” as-
signment. He was dispatched to the scene of an alleged streetcar holdup
on the western edge of St. Louis. Accordingly, he filed three dramatic re-
views based on press accounts and advance notices and set out for the scene
of the crime. Nobody knew anything about a holdup when he got there,
and by the time he returned to the center of the city it was too late to check
with the theaters to make sure the companies had actually performed—it
was a common occurrence for storms to wash out roads or low bridges and
thus prevent companies from arriving in time to perform, and it had rained
violently that evening.
He thought of checking with his counterpart at the Republic, but didn’t,
later comparing this psychic paralysis to Poe’s “imp of the perverse,” where
we fail to act to save ourselves. (Buried in Poe’s anticipation of the Pre-
Raphaelite Movement and the aesthetic one championed by Oscar Wilde,
another hero of Dreiser’s, are the deterministic themes that underscore
Dreiser’s later fictions and masterpieces.) In fact, two of the touring com-
panies for whom Dreiser had written notices (not three, as remembered in
Newspaper Days) were missing in action that night. In one of those reviews,
of Uncle Tom’s Cabin scheduled for Pope’s Theater, he remembered calling
the performance “unworthy” and “top-heavy”; the meaning of the last ad-
jective is unclear in the text of Newspaper Days. In the review itself, appearing
in the Globe-Democrat of May 1, the only performance deemed “unwor-
thy” is that of Peter Jackson, one of several famed pugilists of the day (among
them John L. Sullivan) who were introduced into plays regardless of their
acting talent in hopes of drawing big audiences. Jackson, an Australian black
heavyweight, played “Uncle Tom.” The “top-heavy” comment was proba-
bly directed at the anticipated audience, which tended to overfill the the-
ater’s balconies and galleries whenever a prizefighter appeared on stage, es-
pecially in blackface.32
Dreiser claimed he was so embarrassed by the fiasco that rather than face
McCullagh he sheepishly left him a note of apology and resignation. He
envisioned himself as the laughingstock of St. Louis. He was right to a cer-
tain extent, for this time, unlike with the “Black Patti” incident, he didn’t
have to exaggerate the response from the competing newspapers.33 They
came out in the city’s afternoon newspapers with satiric barbs the same day
t h i s m a t t e r o f r e p o r t i n g
6 3
his bogus reviews appeared. Dreiser claimed that McCullagh was sorry he
had resigned. This may sound self-serving, but it was a common practice
for drama critics to crib from the advance publicity; no doubt it had hap-
pened before.
–
Dreiser picked up his reporter’s life almost without missing a beat. Within
a week he was hired by the Republic at eighteen dollars a week, seven less
than what he had been getting on the Globe-Democrat. He got on with its
city editor, H. B. Wandell, better than he had with Mitchell, yet he re-
membered Wandell as a narrow-minded and self-serving Machiavellian who
would do just about anything to get the story first. A “mouse-like” little
man with piercing hawk eyes and “dark, swarthy skin,” he cackled mirth-
lessly whenever he was ahead of the competition.34
Here too Dreiser’s testimony is contested by another survivor from his
autobiographical past. Tobias Mitchell, for example, was probably dead by
the time Newspaper Days was first published (in 1922, with the title A Book
About Myself ), but Wandell was exceedingly alive and incensed at Dreiser’s
extended remarks about him. Describing himself as still “an editorial
writer, actively engaged,” he threatened to sue Dreiser’s publisher, Boni &
Liveright. More significantly, he described Dreiser in his St. Louis days as
“vile, licentious, dishonorable and ignorant” and never a true newspaper-
man. “He was a cheap and super-sexative [ sic] faker, always with the li-
bidinous uppermost in his mind—at least that was the general opinion held
of him here—a parasite and a leech.” Wandell’s testimony may be exag-
gerated because of his anger, but his comment about sexual excess may throw
into clearer focus Dreiser’s portrait of himself as sex-starved. In other words,
Dreiser may have developed his reputation as a womanizer as early as 1893,
a time when he still described himself as shy around women. “Women,” he
confesses in a moment of greater candor in his autobiography, “were not
included in my moral speculations as among those who were to receive strict
justice—not pretty women.”35
Dreiser worked for the Republic for about nine months, until February or
March of 1894, but he doesn’t have that much to say about the experience.
It was generally a continuation of his assignments on the Globe-Democrat,