would also help to account for his sustained bursts of energy as a novelist
later on.) Like his “varietistic” protagonists from George Hurstwood to
Clyde Gri‹ths, Dreiser loved most what he couldn’t have. Perhaps Jug
would, at least literally, hold on to him the longest because she held out the
longest. Even his eventual second wife, Helen, whose intimate attachment
outlasted all the other Dreiser women, was jolted out of paradise early and
regularly in their twenty-five-year association.
Grand Rapids (“Ohio, not Michigan,” Dreiser reminds the reader of A
Hoosier Holiday, as if to italicize his uneasy sense of going oª to nowhere)
sat on the Maumee River in the northwest corner of the state, about fifteen
miles from Toledo. The river, he recalled, was “a wide and shallow aªair,
flowing directly through the heart of the town and tumbling rapidly over
grey stones, a spectacle which had suggested the name of the town.”3 Its
beauty impressed him far more than the town itself, or for that matter his
prospects there. Consisting mostly of one- and two-story framed dwellings
and brick storefronts, Grand Rapids sat in rural surroundings dotted with
gaunt oil wells whose industrial hue made them stand out in the still snow-
covered landscape. After he and Hutchinson had inspected the newspaper
o‹ce and equipment to be purchased—a bleak aªair that had been inop-
erative for more than a year—they queried the local merchants to gauge
s u r v i v a l o f t h e f i t t e s t
7 1
the advertising potential. The merchants, including a druggist, a banker,
and a stable owner, stared at the two “as if we were adventurers from Mars.”
The town fathers weren’t even sure they wanted a newspaper in Grand
Rapids to read, much less one in which to advertise. Moreover, they wanted
to know what the politics of such a newspaper would be and whether its
editors, or at least the newcomer Dreiser, were “good moral boys and
whether we would work hard for the interests of the town and against cer-
tain unsatisfactory elements.”4
Having grown up in the narrow-minded and economically deprived
towns of Indiana, Dreiser soon suspected that their newspaper scheme
would not have worked on any basis. Even so, the two prospective editors
also looked over a more expensive paper for sale in nearby Bowling Green.
By then Hutchinson himself seemed discouraged. By mid-March, Dreiser
decided to move on, thinking that he might settle for another reporter’s po-
sition in Toledo. Although he did not wish to settle down in this city of
one hundred thousand—by now he wasn’t even sure he wanted to continue
in the field of journalism—he thought Toledo might be pleasant for six
months or so.
–
Dreiser never forgot his train ride to Toledo along the beautiful Maumee,
with its sloping banks and occasional waterfalls and rapids. And though he
would try later, he would also never forget a young man he met there, the
new city editor of the Toledo Blade, who was destined “to take a definite
and inspiriting part in my life.” Arthur Henry, who claimed to be a direct
descendant of Patrick Henry, had previously worked in Chicago, where he
had covered Cook County politics for the Herald with the future novelist
Brand Whitlock. When he came to the Blade the previous November, he
was already engaged to Maude Wood, an independent-minded young
woman who worked as a reporter on the paper; the couple married in May
1894.5 His Napoleonic profile and cherubic countenance gave him a look
at once of accomplishment and youthful innocence.(He was, in fact, four
years older than Dreiser.) Henry confided his dreams of becoming a poet
and a novelist and had already written some poems. What Henry didn’t tell
his new friend was that he was already the author of one novel, Nicholas
Blood, Candidate (1890).
Anticipating the genre of novels favoring the activities of the Ku Klux
s u r v i v a l o f t h e f i t t e s t
7 2
Klan, the most popular of which would be Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman
(1905), Nicholas Blood, Candidate capitalized on the Negrophobia that had
developed in the United States since the Civil War and Reconstruction. As
much a screed as a novel, it takes place in Memphis following the passage
of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, which gave black males the consti-
tutional right to vote. “Does anybody doubt that America has among her
possibilities a Reign of Terror?” the epigraph asks. “We have 8,000,000 chil-
dren of the night among us, and, like the shadows of a dark and stormy
night, they spread swiftly. . . . Let us look at them.” Nicholas Blood alarms
the white citizens of the city when he runs unsuccessfully for mayor. Among
the stock characters are northern whites—second-generation abolitionists—
who relocate in the South and initially give blacks the benefit of the doubt,
until they are dissuaded by tales of their barbarous conduct. One disillu-
sioned Yankee tells his former Confederate foes: “Before the war I cursed
you, and you deserved it then. After the war I called you bloodthirsty lords
and damned tyrants. I used to hold up the poor colored brethren to view
as an oppressed and lamb-like race.”
But Blood destroys these beliefs when he turns violent after his political
defeat. He kills one white man as he walks down Beale Street and later rapes
the man’s daughter while she is visiting her old mammy in the black sec-
tion of the city. The tale is addressed to those northern whites who still
think of blacks as passive and submissive, as they appeared as slaves. (In-
deed, the lynching era was largely fueled by white fears about blacks who
would no longer be “properly” raised under slavery.) Another victim of black
barbarity in this book is Philander Matthews, who thinks black rule is in-
evitable, if also undesirable. Finally, the white woman’s honor is avenged
by the stereotyped white hero, Thomas Judd, a Yankee and a former abo-
litionist whose motto is that the “negro is the greatest problem in Amer-
ica, but I know very little of him.” Judd throws Blood oª a high balcony
after the black fiend and his cohorts have set fire to the city. The story ends
with the warning that blacks are multiplying much faster than whites in
Memphis and elsewhere in the South, which is now “at last awakening from
its long sleep.”6
It is impossible to know whether Arthur Henry truly harbored these racist
sentiments or was simply availing himself of an opportunity to write a for-
mulaic novel in Jim Crow America. Perhaps it was both, but by the time
he met Dreiser, he was apparently embarrassed about the book, and he later
falsely claimed that no copies of it had ever been distributed.7 In the nine-
teenth century—easily as late as the 1890s—educated or socially enlight-
s u r v i v a l o f t h e f i t t e s t
7 3
ened whites like Henry and the future author of “Nigger Jeª ” didn’t hate
or fear blacks in the manner of the narrator in Nicholas Blood, but they were
probably part of the consensus that perceived blacks as genetically inferior
to whites and thus an emerging social problem. As late as 1945, Henry’s
first wife described the book as simply “a story of the negro menace to
whites,” which Arthur had written as a “side issue” while on assignment in
the South for Frank Leslie’s magazine.8
When Dreiser presented himself at the Blade, Henry made immediate
use of the itinerant reporter—whom he later recalled as looking “gaunt,
rugged, a little dishevelled from his travels” the day the two met. Toledo
was in the throes of a streetcar strike that threatened to turn violent. Learn-
ing that the streetcar company was going to run a strike-breaking car on
the lines the next day and having no reporter on hand to send on what might
be a dangerous assignment, the city editor oªered Dreiser the assignment
on a per diem basis. As Henry remembered it, Dreiser “rode with the car
and returned with the story. I read it, rushed it to the composing room,
hovered over it and read the proof myself so that no loyal proof-reader could
carry it to the Owners of the paper and have it killed or changed. It was a
great story and nearly cost me my job.”9
The Toledo streetcar strike was one of two that would influence the scenes
in Sister Carrie where Hurstwood becomes a scab, but it was not nearly as
violent as the Brooklyn streetcar strike of 1895, which Dreiser only read
about. In Toledo the strikers threw rotten eggs and mud at those who crossed
the picket line; in Brooklyn they threw brickbats and stones. He took gen-
erally a neutral point of view in his story of March 24, but his sympathy