ary 9, 1900, Dreiser ridiculed the decision, saying it was absurd to worry
about the sex of ant workers while accepting the possibility of a human trans-
formed into an ant. As to scientific fact, the veteran of magazine articles from
“Electricity in the Household” to “Japanese Home Life” assured Johnson
the story was correct according to Sir John Lubbock’s authoritative study
of Ants, Bees and Wasps. He also accused the magazine of employing one
of its clerks instead of a literary person to read his manuscript. Johnson re-
sponded on January 13 that his story had indeed been read by one of the
editors, and was rejected mainly because of the editorial board’s “consider-
able dislike for allegory.”40 Eventually “The Shining Slave Makers” appeared
in the June 1901 issue of Ainslee’s and earned its author $75.
In the story Robert McEwen falls asleep after killing an ant one hot Au-
gust day and wakes up as one of the tribe of the Shining Slave Makers who
are at war with the Red Slave Makers. What follows is a personal battle for
survival with echoes of The Red Badge of Courage. Dreiser must have seen
the similarity when he revised his story for Free and Other Stories (1918), for
he has McEwen falling into an “insane lust of combat” like that which ul-
timately absorbs Crane’s protagonist.41 In fact, Dreiser revised this story
more than he did any of the other Maumee stories. In its revision, there is
an emphasis on the need for social interdependence in a world best depicted
with battle imagery—a need to share food and assist comrades. The orig-
inal, however, is blindly Darwinistic. When the protagonist wakes from his
dream or vision of having participated in the continual warfare of the “thou-
sands and thousands [of ants] engaged in terrific battle,” his sense of sor-
row is nothing more than “a vague, sad something out of far-oª things.”
The ants were no more important to McEwen than the fly Dreiser had writ-
ten about in Pittsburgh or the prostitute with needle marks he had visited
there. Life was a struggle that bordered on suicide. The fly had plunged it-
self into the housewife’s cup of steaming coªee. The girl had sealed her own
fate in the struggle for economic survival.
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In discussing “When the Old Century Was New,” critics usually fail to
point out that it appeared in its original publication in Pearson’s for Janu-
ary 1901 with the subtitle “A Love Story.” Young William Walton in the
first spring of the “Old Century” is in love not only with the woman who
becomes his fiancée but with the coming century, which promises nothing
but upward change. The story has been called a parody of the popular his-
torical romances that upper-class magazines such as Century and Harper’s
published (while rejecting Dreiser’s allegory about ants). But if so, it is also
one with Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” in that the pro-
tagonist is a naïf in the New World, dazzled by his prospects, as he strolls
by the City Reservoir and through the idyllic Bowery. By the end of the
nineteenth century these will become, respectively, the Tombs prison, where
executions were held, and the skid row in which Hurstwood dies.42 But the
story argues that it is love, love of life and anticipation of its comforts and
pleasures, that saves us, at least temporarily from the impending doom of
the future. In Sister Carrie, Carrie dreams such dreams as she will never re-
alize, and until the very end the down-and-out Hurstwood never quite gives
up his dreams of becoming a manager again.
“Butcher Rogaum’s Door” appeared on December 12, 1901, in the radical
William Marion Reedy’s Mirror, a Chicago magazine that would publish
many writers of the coming Chicago Renaissance, including Dreiser’s fu-
ture friend Edgar Lee Masters. This story has been dismissed as “a markedly
plain, melodramatic tale of a transparently didactic nature,” but again this
criticism fails to credit the same mood of impending disaster in life we find
elsewhere in the fiction leading up to Sister Carrie. 43 It is also, in its German
dialect, imposing father, and restless daughter, an anticipation of Jennie
Gerhardt—and a story drawn right out of Dreiser’s family past, with its
tensions between John Paul Dreiser and his hedonistic daughters. Dreiser
also drew upon his police reporter’s experience (as he would a quarter cen-
tury later in An American Tragedy) to give the point of view of the Irish
police o‹cers who investigate Theresa’s disappearance and disapprove of
the way the German immigrant is raising his daughter. When a wayward
girl of Theresa’s age is found dead at Rogaum’s door after having swal-
lowed acid, the old man learns that she too had been locked out of her
house once upon a time, and he begins to worry whether he had gone too
far in trying to teach his daughter “a lesson.” On the one hand, Rogaum
is insensitive to his daughter’s adolescent restlessness, but on the other he
is right to want to keep her from the company of Connie Almerting, a
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young man of dubious reputation. In the end Theresa is found safe and
returned to her parents. Almerting is su‹ciently frightened by the o‹cers
to stay away from her. Yet he has the last words in the story (which he doesn’t
quite have in its revision for Free), and they leave the reader with the same
unease about the future. “Let him have his old daughter,” Almerting shouts
back at the police as they release him and adds significantly, “They had
better not lock her out, though—that’s all I say.”44 The abiding sense of
the story is that it will probably happen again and the next time she won’t
be so lucky.
The animal nature of man is so strong, Dreiser is saying, that it often can-
not be denied, even when the risks are certain. This understanding is most
dramatically demonstrated in Dreiser’s finest short story of the pre– Sister
Carrie period, “Nigger Jeª.” It is unfortunate that Dreiser chose to use the
word “nigger” in his title, for, in large part because of that, the story is to-
day no longer anthologized in college surveys of American literature. Cer-
tainly Dreiser was sympathetic throughout his life to the plight of Amer-
ican blacks (participating in protests of the conviction of the Scottsboro Boys
in Alabama for the same crime for which Jeª Ingalls hangs in his story and
leaving in his will a significant amount to fund a black orphanage), but in
the late nineteenth century (and well into the twentieth) the “N-word” could
be found in nursery rhymes and popular songs.45 The Songs of Paul Dresser
includes “I’se Your Nigger If You Wants Me, Liza Jane” and “You’se Just a
Little Nigger, Still You’se All Mine All Mine.” (The latter is about a parent’s
love and the advice that being just a black person is a burden which must
be accepted for the best—that there is no use in “fussin’” because “We ain’t
got all de comforts like the white folks, rich an’ fine.”) It is worth remem-
bering that if the songs indulge in the usual condescension and racism of
their day, they also embrace blacks as humans with the same capacity for
love and the same ambitions and lusts for life as whites.
Some day among de cullud folks you’ll have a great big name,
Of course some of de white folks think dat somehow you won’t do,
But trust in de Lordy an’ he’ll sho’ take care o’ you.
Such might have been the hope of the lynching victim’s mother in “Nig-
ger Jeª,” whom Eugene Davies, the newspaper reporter in the story, finds
curled up in agony after the hanging. “I’ll get that in,” Dreiser has him ex-
claim in the final words of the story. “I’ll get it all in.”
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And this is precisely Dreiser’s great accomplishment in “Nigger Jeª,” to
get it all in. The story, whose title in manuscript is “A Victim of Justice,”
is based primarily on an article about a lynching just north of St. Louis that
Dreiser published in the Republic for January 18, 1894, entitled “Ten-Foot
Drop.” As noted earlier, however, the short story also draws generally on
the lynching era from which it comes. In the 1890s, such vigilante hang-
ings of blacks happened frequently in America, but mostly in the South.
One clue to identify the hanging outside St. Louis as the main source for
the story published in Ainslee’s for November 1901 is the fictional city edi-
tor’s comment on dispatching Davies to the scene that “A lynching up there
would be a big thing.”46 Actually, there are two Republic reports of the lynch-