power of such individuals. In The Titan Cowperwood improves public trans-
portation, but he also takes financial advantage of the people through his
monopolistic control.
–
By contrast, the themes of the Delineator stayed closer to such domestic
subjects as children and motherhood. Editing both the Bohemian and the
Delineator (which was his primary editorial assignment, with other editors
supervising Design and New Idea for Women) may have cemented his life-
long pattern of standing up for the poor and exploited while admiring the
captains of industry. In his day job he was content to exploit the public
sense of home and hearth. One early issue of the Delineator under Dreiser’s
editorship—in the column “Concerning Us All”—assailed the fashionable
preference of the teddy bear (the result of President Theodore Roosevelt’s
popularity) over the doll baby as the principal toy given to young girls.
“When your little girl asked for a doll and you gave her a Teddy Bear,” wrote
the man who thought he was actively depriving his wife of a child, “your
r e t u r n o f t h e n o v e l i s t
1 9 4
action was fraught with a consequence that is only excusable on the ground
of your ignorance.” Rather than merely replacing one toy with another, “You
really were supplanting one ideal with another. . . . Take away a little girl’s
dolly and you have interfered with the nascent expression of motherhood.”8
Other subjects closer to “home” included a series on “Woman’s Suªrage”
(promising a number of “diªering viewpoints” but suggesting at the out-
set such Menckenesque headings as “Woman’s Broom in Municipal House-
keeping” and “The Funny Side of Woman’s Suªrage,” “Simplicity in Dress”
[but not fashion], and “Bright Sayings of Children”).
Dreiser’s most successful editorial campaign to keep the Delineator in the
national spotlight was the Child Rescue program “for the child that needs
a home, and the home that needs a child.” With more than two million
married women without children in the country and orphans filling up its
institutions, the Delineator undertook, beginning with its November 1907
issue, to bring the two together. It furnished pictures and descriptions of
orphans for whom homes were needed, promising to assist in the adop-
tions. The program stumbled slightly at first when the president of the print-
ing trade union in New York pointed out the hypocrisy of a magazine that
would seek to find homes for children while also denying its printers a fair
wage and an eight-hour day, thus threatening the homes of their children.
“Is it not fairer as well as wiser,” the trade union asked, “to protect the home
of the child rather than help him find another home after his own has been
taken from him?” Otherwise, the campaign was an unmarred public rela-
tions coup, with thousands of would-be parents responding to the featured
waifs. In the company of James E. West (a prominent citizen and himself
an orphan) and other o‹cers of the Home-Finding Society, Dreiser visited
the White House on October 10, 1908, to inform President Roosevelt of
its activities. He returned to Washington on January 25, 1909, for a confer-
ence the president held on the welfare of “the children who are destitute
and neglected but not delinquent.”9
Dreiser was now part of the New York glamour scene he had once eyed
without hope, comfortably situated at a salary that would climb to possibly
$10,000 a year. Soon after the White House conference, he was included
among the dignitaries at a banquet at the Plaza Hotel for the American Civic
Alliance (where he was soon made a member and served as secretary). In-
vited guests included President-elect William Howard Taft, New York gov-
ernor Charles Evans Hughes, J. P. Morgan, Admiral Dewey, and Andrew
Carnegie, whom Dreiser had tried unsuccessfully to interview in the 1890s.
Literary members of the Alliance included Hamlin Garland, Julian Haw-
r e t u r n o f t h e n o v e l i s t
1 9 5
thorne, and William Dean Howells, another di‹cult interviewee of Dreiser’s
in the previous decade, as we have seen.10 His energetic and worshipful staª
at Butterick included William C. Lengel, an attorney from the Midwest
who was trying to become an actor in New York. To make ends meet, Lengel
became Dreiser’s private secretary and then assistant editor. When Lengel
first met Dreiser, he thought he looked more like a college professor than
the editor of a fashion magazine. His “large, finely modeled head” was cov-
ered with “a rather obstinate, unruly growth of hair of the color of wet
straw.” His eyebrows were bushy, and his cast eye was set lower than the
good one. Lengel read Sister Carrie soon after being hired. “From that day
on,” he told Swanberg, “I was Dreiser’s slave.”11
In giving the Boston Globe a prospectus of the coming year’s features for
the Delineator, Dreiser added confidentially to its editor Charles W. Tay-
lor, Jr., “Of course the famous Butterick fashions will, as ever, charm the
feminine heart. God bless the ladies! My dear boy, what would you and I
do without them. . . . Never forget that it is The Delineator that decides
how they shall appear to you and me.” Working for—indeed leading—“the
Fashion Authority of the World” left its impression on the future literary
works of Theodore Dreiser. Having access finally in his life to well-appointed
homes and apartments, fine restaurants, and the general swirl of the fash-
ion and arts scene, he would better be able to imagine the life of somebody
higher on the social scale than Carrie Meeber or Jennie Gerhardt—for ex-
ample, Jennie’s lover Lester Kane, who hails from the upper reaches of so-
ciety. One of his ablest future editors (and lovers) once commented that
Dreiser was naive “in his conception of the rich and poor and the gap be-
tween them. That was one of the weaknesses of his novels. His rich people
sounded childish.”12 There is more than a little truth to this observation.
The background characters in his Cowperwood trilogy seem at least a lit-
tle wooden in the enjoyment of their creature comforts, but Dreiser also
came up against or worked for men like his fictional titan. His boss at
Butterick, a corporation that employed 2,500 workers in one building,
George W. Wilder, was—though a family man—no doubt as profession-
ally aggressive as the fictional Cowperwood.
Long out of threadbare suits and no longer living in cold water flats,
Dreiser—who would become a sporty dresser—now sometimes parted his
hair in the middle and wore fashionable suits with stiª collars and bright
vests. His spectacles gave him the look of a studious yet worldly man of let-
ters and the city. Yet in most of his photographs of this period, he appears
to gaze beyond his comfortable situation to a satisfaction or fulfillment that
r e t u r n o f t h e n o v e l i s t
1 9 6
is ever illusive. As Mencken continued his contributions beyond his ghost-
writing of the child care pieces, the interaction between these two men
of letters in the world of women and fashion would often rise to higher
levels. Discussing Mencken’s “The Decay of Churches,” Dreiser questioned
the statement as to whether individuals ought to countenance a theory “that
their fate is determined by the arbitrary moods of the Gods.” They
shouldn’t, he argued, “but how about the fixed rules? And isn’t seeking
knowledge (scientific) a form of prayer? Aren’t scientists & philosophers at
bottom truly reverential and don’t they wish (pray) ardently for more knowl-
edge?” Mencken, an atheist while Dreiser was never more than an agnos-
tic, replied that scientific investigation diªers from prayer because when
one studies nature without religious ideology “he is trying to gain means
of fighting his own way in the world, but when he prays he confesses that
he is unable to do so.”13
Socially, Dreiser was also getting a little bored—certainly with Jug. In
the fall of 1909, he met the seventeen-year-old daughter of Annie Cudlipp,
who was an assistant editor at Butterick. Three years earlier Annie had
moved from Richmond to Staten Island with her daughter, Thelma, and
two sons, Jerome and Olaª. Thelma, the youngest, studied at the Artists
League in Manhattan. She and her mother became part of Theo and Jug’s
social circle, which included Fritz Krog, Robert Amick, and Franklin
Booth—all younger than Dreiser and fellow writers or artists. Frequently,
this group would gather for weekends or Saturday evenings at the Cudlipp
residence on Staten Island, where they would go dancing at the Yacht Club.
Krog had worked as an editor for Dreiser on the Bohemian, and Mrs. Cud-
lipp hoped to pair him up with her daughter. But he was apparently no
match for the older, surer, and richer Dreiser, whose eminence held the
group together. “Theo loved to dance,” Thelma remembered more than fifty