The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

though the Republic appears to have been more interested in local news, scan-

dals, and exposés. One of his compatriots remembered Dreiser as “better as

t h i s m a t t e r o f r e p o r t i n g

6 4

a writer than in getting the news.” The articles attributed to him, or sus-

pected to have been written by him, in his collected journalism for this period

show him reporting on domestic murders, train robberies, hangings, lynch-

ings, spiritualists—the usual run of sensational newspaper stories of that day

that were often hyped up for maximum eªect.36

One of the spiritualists investigated by the Republic makes a fleeting ap-

pearance in Sister Carrie—Jules Wallace, a hard-drinking Irishman whom

the paper set out to embarrass in the fall of 1893. Wandell assigned Dreiser

to hang about the site of the spiritualist’s performances and his residence

in the hope of digging up some dirt. Dreiser managed to learn from Wal-

lace’s landlady, who had spied on her raucous tenant through a keyhole,

that the medium had used his room for group sex. She claimed to have seen

Wallace and two associates cavorting with partially nude women. And to

support her testimony, this “moralist” had purloined a card left by one of

the women for Wallace and turned it over to Dreiser.

When Dreiser went to the address in an upscale neighborhood to con-

front the woman in question, she fell to her knees and begged him to drop

the matter. She even tried to bribe him with sex when he refused her pleas

to drop the matter and said he had no choice but to turn the evidence over

to his city editor. As it turned out, Wandell did not pursue this angle of

the campaign against Wallace because, as Dreiser hints in the manuscript

of his autobiography (material that was not included in the published ver-

sion in 1922), Wandell may have compromised himself by accepting the

woman’s sexual advances. We might applaud Dreiser for his professional-

ism, as well as his disinclination to take sexual advantage of a desperate

woman, but whatever his other shortcomings in dealing with women,

Dreiser probably never coerced anybody into sex. On the other hand, in

turning over the evidence to Wandell, Dreiser—the future author of “im-

moral literature”—was enforcing the puritanical mandates of society he af-

terward so vigorously and vociferously opposed. His view of the matter at

the time was simply that he “had done a very clever piece” of reporting.37

During his fourteen or so months in St. Louis, Dreiser moved three or

four times, and in at least two of these rooming houses, his landlady, older

than himself, became his sexual partner. While living at the corner of Tenth

and Walnut, he got involved with a woman who reminded him of his

mother. Like Sarah Dreiser, “Mrs. Zernhouse” was large, buxom, and peas-

antlike. Also like Sarah, she was of Germanic background, and her late hus-

band had been the victim of a factory accident. Dreiser often visited her

room after a late-night assignment. Sometimes Mrs. Zernhouse waited for

t h i s m a t t e r o f r e p o r t i n g

6 5

him in his room and once surrendered herself to him stimulated by the

knowledge that he had shared his bed with a younger woman earlier in the

day. Later he recalled Mrs. Z’s “blazing orgasms.” In another rooming

house, on Chestnut Street just beyond Jeªerson, he took up with “Mrs.

X,” who was a little younger than Mrs. Z, but more promiscuous. Dreiser,

however, wanted more than sex—not “this kind of woman but an ineªable

poetic something. . . .”38 In spite of his sexual restlessness, he still subscribed

to the very conventional idea of true love—and he soon believed he had

found it.

As a way to take advantage of the long awaited Chicago World’s Fair, for-

mally the Columbian Exposition, the Republic had staged a statewide con-

test to find the favorite teacher in each of Missouri’s school districts. The

winners, mostly young women, were to be sent to the Chicago Fair for two

weeks, all expenses paid. One might wonder here whether the randy Wan-

dell was not putting the fox in the henhouse when he assigned the “super-

sexative” Dreiser to accompany the young ladies and write up their adven-

tures for the paper. Whatever the case, Dreiser was delighted to find himself

on the way to Chicago in a lavish Pullman car surrounded by what he would

call in his dispatches back to the Republic the “Forty Odd”—a “bevy” of

young ladies and their relatives, mainly nubile younger sisters.39 It is on just

such a train to Chicago that Charles Drouet meets Carrie Meeber in the

opening pages of Sister Carrie—and his train ride is based in part on the

one Dreiser took from St. Louis to Chicago in 1893: in that Pullman filled

with marriageable young women, his future wife, Sara Osborne White of

Montgomery City, Missouri, stood out for her innocent looks and quiet

charm.

Jug, as she was called for her beautiful hair, the reddish-brown color of

an earthen jug of the song, hailed from a family almost as large as Dreiser’s,

with seven girls and three boys. Their economic backgrounds were also

similar, she having grown up in rural Missouri. Jug had become a contest

winner, she told him, because her friends bought hundreds of the Repub-

lic issues advertising the competition and clipped the coupons. What a

wonderful thing, he thought, to have such loyal friends. Jug wore her hair

clasped in a bun behind her head. She had a slightly weak chin, but this

was oªset by a soft mouth and large liquid eyes. Her lithe figure and gen-

tle half smile sent Dreiser into near spasms of desire. He sensed almost

immediately that there was an unspoken bond of sympathy between them.

Yet at the same time, he as readily imagined himself with several of the

other beauties on the train, including the less inhibited Annie Ginity, who

t h i s m a t t e r o f r e p o r t i n g

6 6

easily responded to Dreiser’s advances, and Jug’s younger sister Rose, who

didn’t.

Like many of the twenty-seven million visitors to the World’s Fair that

year, Rose paid her own way from out of town, even though she could hardly

aªord to do so. Indeed, the anticipation over the fair was so great and wide-

spread that some people even mortgaged their homes to be able see the sights

at Jackson Park on the shores of Lake Michigan. Designed to celebrate the

four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World,

the Exposition also celebrated by implication America’s full recovery from

the Civil War and the idea that through its technology America was des-

tined to become the world’s leader in the twentieth century. Perhaps

tellingly, the fair opened a year late for the anniversary, just as America was

entering the depression years of 1893–97, but during its run, optimism re-

mained high. Certainly, as Dreiser noted in his autobiography, it was seen

as a clear symbol for Chicago’s own metamorphosis. “Here all at once, as

it were, out of nothing, in this dingy city of six or seven hundred thou-

sand, which but a few years before had been a waste of wet grass and mud

flats, and by this lake, which a hundred years before was but a lone silent

waste, was now this vast and harmonious collection of perfectly constructed

and snowy buildings, containing in their delightful interiors . . . the artis-

tic, mechanical and scientific achievements to date.”40

The main part of the White City (so-called for its white neoclassical

domed structures made out of plaster and fiber) consisted of a long basin

with exhibition halls, including an Administration Building and a Court

of Honor. The Grand Basin was elaborately connected by bridges and wa-

terways to a series of terraced lagoons designed by Frederick Law Olmstead,

famed as the designer of New York’s Central Park. Here were found more

enchanting buildings and statuary. The two main sculptures of the exhi-

bition, Daniel Chester French’s Republic and Frederick William MacMon-

nie’s Columbian Fountain, stood in the middle of the basin. Tourists

thought French’s mammoth creation resembled the Statue of Liberty, while

the Administration Building reminded Exposition visitors of the Capitol

in Washington. The grand architecture, as one historian notes, represented

“a return not to the Rome of the Caesars but to the chaste classicism of

Thomas Jeªerson.” The palatial aura of this neoclassical city—its idealized

gardens and lighted white buildings—made an impression on Dreiser that

later translated into Carrie Meeber’s infatuation with the mansions along

Chicago’s north shore in Chicago.41 An ancillary feature of the Fair—

certainly another indelible literary impression for Dreiser—was the new