The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

no longer signed “The Prophet.” Its worldview shifted as well. We now

hear echoes of the conventional sentiments of Paul, whose songs contin-

ued to sell to the “millions,” as he would later claim in the Metropolitan.

The April editorial in Ev’ry Month complains good-heartedly about the

“fairer sex,” and how juries are often too lenient to convict a woman for

her crime. Before a dozen men, she escapes punishment because of the

male’s “innate sympathy for the opposite sex, which will not down.” In

earlier issues, the problem—as Howley, Haviland, and Company may now

have recognized—was the fact that the images of realism and fantasy had

conveyed conflicting moral messages. While “The Prophet” complained

of the rents in the social fabric, illustrations in the magazine projected im-

ages of beautiful women, near sated with their dreams of riches and fame.

Now the women who fluttered through the pages of Ev’ry Month were no

longer subject to Darwin’s implied notions about social behavior; now

men were to be exonerated “for their error of judgment where women are

concerned.”43

Beginning in the spring of 1897, the searching rhetoric of Dreiser’s

Spencerian conscience transforms into a sermon characterized by a blend

of Social Darwinism and Christianity. Every man has the innate right to

“search far and wide” over the earth in search of prosperity, yet it is con-

ceded that “so many thousands or hundreds of thousands of illiterate im-

migrants every year” will both reduce wages and through the ballot box

“lower the moral standard of the nation.”44 Such xenophobia was possibly

more the bailiwick of Paul, who changed his German surname, than of

Theodore Dreiser, who would later write tenderly about Italian ghettos.

Generally, platitudes replace pathos in a column that is more reactive than

reflective, echoing, for example, Emerson’s antebellum call for American

self-reliance more than forty years after the Civil War and the nation’s as-

cent as a world power, both industrially and intellectually. They speak of

uplifting humanity through the doing of good and the favor of Providence.

e d i t o r i a l d a y s

1 1 3

It might be one’s duty to arouse sympathy among the rich for those whom

the undertow of adversity has swept to the lowest depths, but it is im-

probable that this witness of the deep divisions between the rich and poor

in Pittsburgh and New York would ever believe it possible. Although Dreiser

had read Cahan, he didn’t have to read the muckraker Jacob Riis’s How the

Other Half Lives (1890) to know that “working sympathy” was a hopeful

fantasy. Riis reports, in perhaps an exaggeration, how as many as ten thou-

sand men a night descended on the Bowery in search of an aªordable place

to sleep and possibly eat. Dreiser had seen it for himself—had indeed al-

ready been a part of what Crane called “An Experiment in Misery.” If we

are to trust his recollections, his brother-in-law L. A. Hopkins was now one

of the misérables.

Although he may have continued to contribute reviews, Dreiser was

clearly moving out of the editor’s chair by the spring of 1897. Whenever it

was that he finally left, he and Paul quarreled. They would see each other

only rarely over the next five years. The anger was almost exclusively on

Theo’s part, for Paul always thought of his brother as his brightest and most

promising sibling, whose writing he had faith in long before anyone else.

After Ev’ry Month it was becoming clear to many others that the “young

man from the provinces” could write. He might not write songs for the “mil-

lions,” but he would write for posterity. In the meantime, there was a liv-

ing to make and—ready or not—a woman to marry.

e d i t o r i a l d a y s

1 1 4

s i x

The Writer

–

Outside the door of what was once a row of red brick family

dwellings, in Fifteenth street, but what is now a mission

or convent house of the Sisters of Mercy, hangs a plain wooden

contribution box, on which is painted the statement that every noon

a meal is given free to all those who apply and ask for aid.

“ C U R I O U S S H I F T S O F T H E P O O R ”

dreiser became a magazine writer. It has been said that after “fixing

up other fellows’ articles” for two years, he was more than prepared to write

his own.1 In fact, it was mainly his own articles he had “fixed up” in writ-

ing most of the copy for Ev’ry Month, and there he had learned to write—

to entertain and educate. He couldn’t have come of age as a freelance mag-

azinist at a more propitious time, for the country was at the height of its

transition from human brawn to mechanical power as it approached the

twentieth century, and there was no end of material to write about. Amer-

icans were excited about the prospects of such labor-saving devices as the

horseless carriage and electricity in the home. At the same time, however,

the new technologies created new fears. They undercut the independence

and identity of the artisan or mechanic. In The Twentieth Century (1898),

Josiah Strong noted that it now took sixty-four men to make a simple shoe.2

Love of the homespun small-town life also seemed to be giving way to in-

fatuation with the city and its dependence on the complexity of the new

order. Most of the geniuses of the age appeared to have come from simple

backgrounds, but the ultimate product of their imagination and industry

became lost in their practical applications. The “wizard” Edison had in-

vented the incandescent lightbulb, but his attempts to provide the coun-

try with electricity were already being absorbed by corporations of engi-

1 1 5

neers and investors such as General Electric (once “Edison General Elec-

tric”) and Westinghouse.

The biggest invention was the modern American city. Its magnetism

seemed to be turning America’s agrarian ideal of hard work and clean liv-

ing into an ideological hothouse of ambition and greed. Writers such as

Abraham Cahan and Jacob Riis had already complained about urban

“progress,” and Stephen Crane in Maggie had shown city life to be poten-

tially a helter-skelter aªair, almost surrealistic in its scenes of violence and

mayhem. With newspapers chasing the latest scandal and calling for spu-

rious reforms, the magazine emerged in the late 1890s as a resource for the

middle-class American who sought a more congenial explanation of the

times as well as an a‹rmation that basic values were still the bedrock of a

society intoxicated by its own advances. Essentially, Ev’ry Month existed to

sell sheet music, making even Dreiser’s now defunct “Reflections” column

subordinate to the demands of commerce. But there were other magazines

around—among them Metropolitan, Truth, Munsey’s, and Ainslee’s—livelier

descendants of the purely literary journals such as Century and Harper’s,

and they sold their stories as their main product.

Turning to these magazines, Dreiser struck out on his own, not only be-

cause he had lost control (or been forced out) of Ev’ry Month, but because

he felt increasingly threatened by that other genius in the family, his brother

Paul. Paul’s “On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away” was written in 1897

and quickly sold over five thousand copies. By the next year the song (which

would be o‹cially adopted as Indiana’s state song in 1913) was a national

bestseller.3 Its easy nostalgia took America back to when life seemed less

conflicted:

Round my Indiana homestead wave the cornfield,

In the distance loom the woodlands clear and cool.

Often times my thoughts revert to scenes of childhood,

Where I first received my lessons, nature’s school.

But one thing there is missing in the picture,

Without her face it seems so incomplete.

I long to see my mother in the doorway,

As she stood there years ago, her boy to greet!4

“Yes, dearie,” Dreiser told Jug, “I wrote the words as I said of ‘On the Banks

of the Wabash.’” When he first made this boast, in May of 1898, Jug was

more interested to know who “Mary” was, for the song speaks in its refrain

t h e w r i t e r

1 1 6

of walking arm in arm along the Wabash with a sweetheart by that name.

“There was no ‘Mary’ in my life. That idea is merely introduced for eªect,

nothing more,” he said and teased that she might “store your hate for some

other purpose—perhaps the next girl I get.” (In fact, “Mary” was most likely

based on Mary South, the fourteen-year-old daughter of an acquaintance

of Paul’s in Terre Haute. The song was o‹cially dedicated to her, before

Paul had even met her. Later, after they had met and begun a correspon-

dence, Paul in turn claimed to her that his brother had given him only the