Boy, She Said.” The first appealed to female readers still in search of the
right man, while the second—“respectfully dedicated to the Veterans of the
late War”—told the sad tale of a Civil War mother straining her eyes in
vain to locate her still missing son among the surviving Union soldiers
marching past her on Decoration Day.
I saw an old, old woman, most feeble and most gray,
Look closely at each vet’ran soldier’s face,
I saw the tear-drops trickling down her pinched and withered cheeks,
As she mingled with the throng from place to place.13
Sentimental as it was, this song serves as a reminder that although Dreiser
is viewed as mainly a twentieth-century novelist, he (and his brother) grew
up under the long shadow of the Civil War.
–
Like any editor, especially one just starting out, Dreiser was always on the
lookout for material for his editorials, and the topics in his “Reflections”
range widely—and reveal much about his development as a writer. These
editorials followed a general pattern of beginning with facts, statistics, and
demographics and ending in literary drama. Writing as “The Prophet” and
speaking with the editorial “we” allowed Dreiser to cut the ice and adopt
the tone of a lifelong New Yorker, even referring fondly to “Gotham” as
“innately wicked.” “We are getting to be a very great people,” he boasted
in the November issue. “We are marrying our millionaire daughters oª to
foreign dukes and earls. . . . [and] chasing oª to foreign capitals every spring-
time 100,000 strong, and spending $100,000,000 all told.” He praised the
Cotton States Exposition held in Atlanta that fall to showcase the restora-
tion of the South after the Civil War. He was glad the eastern press was
more receptive to this exposition than they had been to the Chicago World’s
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Fair, whose “White City” he well remembered. He went on to accuse New
York journalists of having been envious of Chicago’s accomplishment: “The
glitter of the lights of days gone by upon its slender turrets and spires still
makes blind with envy those sponsors of New York’s reputation.”14
Still a midwesterner at heart when he wrote those lines, Dreiser would
soon come to identify with New York as the American center to which
all true talent would gravitate. And it was the Ev’ry Month experience that
eªected his complete conversion. Sister Carrie’s plot division between
Chicago and New York probably reflected Dreiser’s lingering sense of du-
ality between the Midwest and the East. Carrie’s innocence is lost in the
first city and replaced in the second with the kind of fantasy only a New
York or a Paris can sustain. But for all the enthusiasm he felt for New York,
he recognized the cost of that fantasy. He had witnessed the pathos of the
hordes of down-and-outers who had migrated from the Midwest and else-
where to Gotham, only to end up in its Bowery instead of the economic
bower they might have imagined. He felt he was beginning to seize upon
the true drama of life, which he thought the newspapers—especially “that
slime-wallowing, barrel house organ, The World” —completely missed.
The time was soon to come, he hoped, when “there will not be any room
[in newspapers] for long articles concerning ‘what we have done,’ nor end-
less words relative to the movements of people in society. Citizens will
not be hounded by verbose reporters, anxious to make a sensation of some-
thing, no matter what.” Moreover, “this degrading system of making spies
and freaks of individuals and then calling them newspaper men, of dele-
gating them to crawl through the sewers and up smoke-stacks, will be
discredited.”15
Such reporters of life, the fraternity of mere “space-writers” to which he
had briefly belonged on the World, should turn their attention, proclaimed
“The Prophet,” from palaver about reform to the true reformations even
then taking place. Dreiser, the future determinist who would record in mi-
crocosmic pictures the meaningless ebb and flow of life in the city, seemed
here almost to anticipate a kind of Christ figure, that Central Man who
haunts the work of nineteenth-century American literature from Emerson
to Whitman, the culmination of which can be found in the “Captain” of
Sister Carrie, who appears each night on Broadway to help the homeless
find shelter from the icy chill of winter. In the October issue Dreiser had
declared that stories about such uplifting examples of reformation were over-
due. Now in the second issue he spoke of reports from the New Mexico
border “of a man, who, walking lowly among the poor, was possessed of
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almost miraculous power.” Desiring no compensation whatever, “he walked
among the sick and the maimed, and all who looked into the deep sym-
pathy of his eyes arose strong in body.” Dreiser was referring to Franz Schlat-
ter, the Denver fakir and self-styled messiah, who eventually disappeared
into Central America. If indeed he was the real thing, Dreiser hinted with
a skepticism that was directed at both the “messiah” and “the lame, halt,
and blind in New York” he might save, “He has come . . . among a people
who are gallivanting after nothing but gold and fame.” Even art in Amer-
ica, he argued in that same issue, too often worshipped at the altar of suc-
cess rather than self-exploration. “Quite distressing it is to me,” wrote the
Prophet, “to observe young men and women laboriously engaged in copy-
ing reproductions of exhumed Grecian marbles of heroes and Goddesses,
when American heroes and Goddesses are thronging Broadway, and not
maintaining unnatural poses either.”16
Indeed, instead of national introspection, America was also obsessed
with the “new”—anything other than its present or past. In the Christmas
issue of Ev’ry Month Dreiser noted how time dissolves man’s material
monuments—how quickly such cities as New York, Chicago, and St. Louis
were sweeping away the old to make way for the new. In New York, “places
austere with historic memories are being assaulted with pick and shovel . . .
and carted away and dumped in gullies somewhere north of Harlem. Places
once frequented by Washington, . . . neighborhoods strolled over by Irv-
ing and Poe, and mentioned in some of our most delightful American
sketches, are being completely transformed.” Certainly, the transformation
of many of New York’s “gorgeous chambers turned into sweatshops where
pale women sew from dawn into the long night,” was proof of the cruelty
of some of the changes taking place.17
That December one of his earliest literary models, Eugene Field, died
suddenly at age forty-five, and here the literary picks and shovels were soon
brought to bear, as critics now reassessed his poems as hopelessly senti-
mental, including his most famous work, “Little Boy Blue.” “Regardless
of the squabble that is now progressing as to the infantile value of Field’s
poetry,” Dreiser insisted, “this ‘Little Boy Blue’ of his will remain renowned
when those who are now arguing have been buried and forgotten.” He
thought that there was “an ebb and flow of heart” in the ballad about the
dead boy whose faithful toys stand “each in the same old place / Awaiting
the touch of a little hand.” When Ralph Waldo Emerson, another of
Dreiser’s favorite American authors, lost his five-year-old son to sudden
death, he too had stared—though unsentimentally—at his son’s playthings
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as the only earthly evidence of the bliss the boy had brought him. Later in
the essay “Experience,” Emerson echoed what he had told a friend only days
following the death, that “I chiefly grieve that I cannot grieve.”18 Field might
wonder “what has become of Little Boy Blue / Since he kissed [his toys]
and put them there,” but it was Emerson the Transcendentalist who
through his belief that nature was nothing more than a mere emblem of
the Oversoul, or higher reality, expressed a kind of determinism that would
become Dreiser’s lifelong paradox, for his heart went out to human suªer-
ing that was nonetheless regarded as inevitable. But for now, in the heady
nineties, with the wealth of the new magnates dwarfing Irvingesque quaint-
ness, it seemed to Dreiser that death was forever upstaged by the gaudy spec-
tacle of life.
And nowhere, he noted, was that gaudy spectacle more compelling than
on Broadway, where there was “everything: windows adorned with rare
paintings and crowded with aged bric-a-brac; windows filled with rarest
gems and gaudiest trifles, all displayed ’neath a hundred electric bulbs to
attract attention.” On Broadway, Dreiser wrote in close imitation of Whit-
man, whose poetic catalogs first put the avenue into American literature,
“surges the cosmopolitan, dallying crowd, and all night the stream of hu-
manity flows past, crowding itself here before a poster and there before a