was clearly with the strikers—which is probably the reason for Henry’s hav-
ing to shepherd the story through the press room.10 The assignment
marked the first time Dreiser had reported on labor unrest, a problem that
was to grow worse throughout the 1890s in the United States.
Henry and Dreiser were drawn to each other immediately. “If he had
been a girl,” Dreiser wrote in Newspaper Days, “I would have married
him. . . . We were intellectual a‹nities at the time at least, or thought we
were. Our dreams were practically identical.”11 In fact, as his future novels,
if not also Nicholas Blood, Candidate, indicate, Henry was a rank senti-
mentalist and—with the exception of The Unwritten Law (1905), which
Dreiser directly influenced—the very opposite of the realist Dreiser became.
Dreiser stayed in Toledo about a week or ten days and wrote a few more
pieces for the Blade on consignment. Henry wanted him to stay, but in spite
of their seemingly “joint chemistries” there was no room on the newspa-
s u r v i v a l o f t h e f i t t e s t
7 4
per. Henry suggested that Dreiser continue east to Cleveland and perhaps
to Pittsburgh in search of work and promised to telegraph him as soon as
there was an opening on the Blade, which he thought would not be long.
–
In Cleveland Dreiser found essentially what he had seen in St. Louis—dark,
narrow streets and houses “small and mean,” full of “dirty, ill-dressed chil-
dren” and “slatterns in lieu of women.” Here, however, such bleak streets
were oªset by the conspicuous consumption of the rich across town. Young
Dreiser marveled at the new mansions on Euclid Avenue of John D. Rock-
efeller and Tom Johnson. In spite of his sincere pity for the poor and ex-
ploited, this Hoosier from hard economic times as sincerely imagined him-
self someday becoming a part of this splendor of money. Like Clyde
Gri‹ths, he remembered “envying the rich and wishing that I was famous
or a member of a wealthy family, and that I might meet some one of the
beautiful girls I imagined I saw there and have her fall in love with me and
make me rich.”12 Yet he was already twenty-three and getting nowhere, it
seemed.
He found another job reporting on consignment, at three dollars a col-
umn for the Cleveland Leader. It might have been significant for his liter-
ary development because the slot was to be not straight reporting but writ-
ing “human interest” stories for the Sunday issues. But the city editor of
the Leader had no imagination and nixed Dreiser’s ideas for features one
after another. Dreiser suggested a piece about the newly rising suburbs, but
the Sunday editor frowned on the idea as giving out free advertising to real
estate developers. He proposed “the magnificence of Euclid Avenue” and
was told it had been done before. So too a “no” about the great steel works
coming to Cleveland. Finally, the editor allowed him to write a story about
a chicken farm on the edge of the city. By the end of a week, he had earned
only $7.50. He spent most of his Cleveland time in the public library, read-
ing a book on Russia and Laurence Sterne’s two-volume Sentimental Jour-
ney through France and Italy (1768), the latter recommended by the romantic
Henry.13
After about a week, Dreiser traveled to Buªalo, partly because he wanted
to visit Niagara Falls. The town did not impress him, and he found no work
there in spite of the fact that Buªalo had four newspapers. He could get
only the promise of a job on one of them weeks in the future. At the Falls
s u r v i v a l o f t h e f i t t e s t
7 5
he sensed the relative smallness of man, overwhelmed and always in dan-
ger of being consumed by giant cosmic or physical forces. “Standing out
on a rock near the greatest volume of water, under a grey sky,” he recalled,
“I was awed by the downpour and then finally became dizzy and felt as
though I were being carried along, whether I wanted to or not.”14 It was in
this mood that he boarded a train for Pittsburgh only an hour after pass-
ing the railroad station and espying a sign announcing that day’s cut-rate
price on the ticket to the Steel City, “Pittsburg, $5.75.”
–
By now the United States had entered its second year of the worst economic
depression of the century. As Dreiser’s train headed for Pittsburgh, so did
Coxey’s Army on its march from Ohio to Washington to demand that Pres-
ident Cleveland implement a public works program to relieve unemploy-
ment. The ragtag army of unemployed, one of several that formed in the
aftermath of the Panic of 1893, wouldn’t find much sympathy in the na-
tion’s capital, where Jacob S. Coxey and his “lieutenants” were ultimately
humiliated by being arrested in Washington for stepping on the grass. And
Pittsburgh, where the great Homestead steel strike of 1892 had been
crushed, wasn’t any friendlier to the economic outcasts. In a headline of
March 26, 1894, the Pittsburgh Dispatch called “General” Coxey’s band of
protesters “The Funniest Thing That They Ever Saw.” Yet the human fall-
out from the depression—fueled not only by labor unrest but by a splurge
of overspeculation on Wall Street, agricultural failures, and agitation for
the replacement of gold with silver to back the nation’s currency—wasn’t
about to go away. Thousands of businesses across the nation had collapsed,
and homeless gangs roamed the country.15
Pittsburgh had a population of about 240,000 when Dreiser reached the
triangle of a city bounded by the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers where
they join to form the Ohio. Across one river to the north lay the rival city
of Allegheny (today designated simply the “North Side”) and to the south
loomed Mt. Washington, whose elevation was reached by ten or more in-
clines, or vertical trolleys. It was dusk when his train pulled in, but the time
of his arrival wouldn’t have mattered, for Pittsburgh frequently seemed dark
or overcast even at noon because of the pall from its many blast furnaces.
Most of the buildings and church steeples were blackened by smoke and
grime.
s u r v i v a l o f t h e f i t t e s t
7 6
More than any other city except New York, it was Pittsburgh that stirred
Dreiser’s evolving literary imagination. Looking back as the author of Sis-
ter Carrie on the seven or eight months he spent there, he thought it had
been a perfect city “for a realist to work and dream in.”16 He had approached
it by rail through “the brown-blue mountains” of western Pennsylvania and
had never before seen such a hilly terrain. Along the way he stared out his
train window at soot-faced miners with their oil lamps and lunch pails, their
shacks and raggedly dressed children, reminding him of the coal miners he
had known as a child in Sullivan. This was his first glimpse of the poverty
he was to find among the coal and steel laborers of Pittsburgh, conditions
that led to continued strikes in the coal industry in nearby Uniontown as
well as in eastern Pennsylvania and Ohio.
In Pittsburgh Dreiser also encountered for the first time various eastern
European nationalities. The king of American steel, Andrew Carnegie, or
his “chairman,” Henry Clay Frick, had routinely averted labor strikes by
replacing one immigrant group with another, promising each in turn the
sky for what turned out to be impossible wages for twelve hours’ work, six
or seven days a week. “I did not then know,” Dreiser later wrote, “of the
padrone, the labor spy, the company store, five cents an hour for breaker
children, the company stockade, all in very full operation at this time. All I
knew was that there [had] been a very great strike in Pittsburgh recently; that
one Andrew Carnegie as well as other steel manufacturers—the Olivers,
for one, and Frick—had built fences and strung them with electrified barbed
wire in order to protect themselves against the ‘lawless’ attacks of ‘lawless’
workingmen.”17
Here, too, the future realist, or naturalist, was stunned by the immense
and immediate contrast between rich and poor. Not long after his arrival,
he rode a streetcar a mile or two along the Monongahela River to the com-
pany town of Homestead. Pinkerton guards now protected the Carnegie
Steel Company, located on the river’s edge in front of a cluster of dilapi-
dated houses. He observed sullen and despondent workers, ousted from
the enormous plant over a year ago, after the strike. They huddled on their
front stoops or idled about the barren streets and empty store fronts. Poles,
Hungarians, Slovaks, and Lithuanians fresh from the cauldron of Europe’s