The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

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

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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

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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