well as the development of transportation and communications after the
war—the railroad, the telegraph, and the telephone—the competitive pace
picked up considerably, so much so that the entrepreneur of the late nine-
teenth century was often compelled to engage in the legerdemain of high
finance and questionable labor practices.10 In 1908, as Dreiser began his se-
rious research into Yerkes’s career, the Harvard Business School was founded
to remap the ethical path of American capitalism, disseminating its “case-
books” to the nation’s universities and “business colleges.”
In 1906—just one month before Paul’s death, an event that also helped
to unmoor Dreiser from family ties in his fiction—Charles Yerkes died of
Bright’s disease after failing in his attempt to monopolize the London Un-
derground. His death set oª a rash of articles in newspapers and periodi-
cals about his controversial career as his financial empire fell apart and lost
its influence. One story at that time that surely reinforced Dreiser’s gut feel-
ing about the rich as a subject for fiction as well as his choice of Yerkes is
preserved among the Dreiser papers at the University of Pennsylvania. Not-
ing that the paucity of great American fiction was not due to the lack of
material, “The Materials of a Great Novel” suggested that the “Yerkes aªair
alone presents enough raw material to lay the foundations of another
Comèdie Humaine if the novelist capable of using it had the courage of
his genius.” It went on to outline Yerkes’s career, which covered three es-
sential stages or cities—Philadelphia, Chicago, and London—and con-
cluded with a shudder at the thought that either Mr. Howells or Mr. James
might ever venture to tell this story.11
This was apparently the spark for the American Balzac’s “Trilogy of De-
sire.” Also influential was Charles Edward Russell’s 1907 essay in Everybody’s
Magazine, which traces the rise and fall of Yerkes in Philadelphia and
Chicago; a year later the same information was the basis of two chapters in
Russell’s Lawless Wealth, published by Dreiser’s old firm of B. W. Dodge.
(It wasn’t until 1916, however, that Dreiser dipped into Gustavus Myers’
History of Great American Fortunes [1910], a volume often cited as an
influence on “The Trilogy of Desire.”) Between 1906 and 1910, while ed-
iting magazines which celebrated American materialism, Dreiser studied
the careers of at least a dozen notable financiers. As he zeroed in on Yerkes,
he consulted a collection of clippings on the first leg of his career in the
l i f e a f t e r t h e t i t a n i c
2 2 3
archives of the Philadelphia Ledger, called to his attention by Joseph H.
Coates, the editor of the Era who had befriended him in Philadelphia in
1902. As a bibliography in Dreiser’s notes for The Financier suggests, he
consulted several volumes on the history and workings of the American
stock market. He also read Edwin LeFèvre’s 1911 essay entitled “What
Availeth It?”—also in Everybody’s—which carried the story of Yerkes’s first
youthful experiment in finance.12 This Dreiser expanded upon in chapter
3 of The Financier. Usually, the first ten years of the twentieth century are
considered Dreiser’s lost decade as far as his art was concerned. But, as his
documented research eªorts for what was to become the Cowperwood tril-
ogy as well as the cluster of novels and travel books that soon flowed from
his pen suggest, he was never very far from the writer’s game.
And just as he had experimented with the pathos of Sister Carrie in “Cu-
rious Shifts of the Poor,” he expressed the underlying idea for The Financier
first in a magazine article. Life in “The Trilogy of Desire” is largely reduced
to the fact that the world is divided into the strong and the weak, and the
weak are either consumed by the strong or somehow survive as parasites or
“factotums” (as Dreiser is fond of calling them). The Financier opens and
closes with animal imagery suggesting this law of nature. Young Cowper-
wood first learns the hard truth about life at a local fish market. There in
an aquarium in the window a lobster first wears down, gradually ampu-
tates, and ultimately devours a squid. When it finally does, Frank concludes:
“That’s the way it has to be, I guess. . . . Things lived on each other—that
was it.” In a 1906 article entitled “A Lesson from the Aquarium,” Dreiser
had coyly observed that the activity of stort minnows, hermit crabs, and
shark suckers reveals “a few interesting facts” about “our own physical and
social condition.” In watching one animal dominate another or position it-
self to make up for weakness, he asked “what set of capitalists, or captains
of industry . . . would not envy the stort minnows in their skill in driving
enemies away? . . . What weakling, seeing the world was against him, and
that he was not fitted to cope with it, would not attach himself, sucker-
wise, to any magnate, trust, political or social (we will not call them sharks),
and content himself with what fell from his table?”13
–
The plot of The Financier can be summed up by reviewing the life of Yerkes
as found in Dreiser’s notes. Born in 1837, Yerkes grew up in Philadelphia as
l i f e a f t e r t h e t i t a n i c
2 2 4
the son of a Quaker-educated banker. Like Henry Worthington Cowper-
wood of the novel, Yerkes’s father was known for his honesty and “old
school” manner. His son attended Central High School and began his for-
mal business life as a clerk in the Philadelphia flour and grain commission.
At twenty-one Yerkes married the older Susanna Gamble (as Frank mar-
ries the older and widowed Lillian Semple) while also opening his own stock-
broker’s o‹ce. During the Civil War he profited greatly and afterward en-
tered into a secret arrangement with the city treasurer to manipulate
municipal bonds. Following the Chicago Fire of 1871, which set oª a finan-
cial panic around the country, Yerkes was unable to meet his loan com-
mitments. As a result, his conspiracy with the city treasurer ( Joseph F.
Marcer in real life, George W. Stener in the novel) was exposed, and both
Yerkes and Marcer were convicted of larceny and fraud and incarcerated in
the Eastern District Penitentiary of Pennsylvania. Sentenced to two years
and nine months, Yerkes was pardoned along with the city treasurer on Sep-
tember 27, 1872, after serving seven months. (Dreiser keeps Cowperwood
in prison for thirteen months.) After losing most of his money, Yerkes man-
aged to recover because of the 1873 failure of Jay Cooke and Company and,
eventually divorcing his wife for a younger woman, went west in 1880, ul-
timately to Chicago, where he began his financial career anew.14
Cowperwood’s career in The Financier follows this scenario almost to the
letter, but such memorable characters as Edward Malia Butler and his daugh-
ter, Aileen, whom Cowperwood seduces, were drawn from Dreiser’s own
experience as well as his research. Butler is based on one Colonel Edward
Butler Dreiser met while he was a reporter for the Globe-Democrat in St.
Louis. Butler spoke in a thick Irish brogue and, also like his fictional coun-
terpart, probably began his climb to political power in the city as an illit-
erate “slop man, a man who could come with a great wagon filled with bar-
rels and haul away the slops from your back door.” The St. Louis Butler,
who made his way into Steªens’s The Shame of the Cities, took a liking to
the young Dreiser the same way the fictional Butler is drawn to young Cow-
perwood. In both cases the young men do not consume alcoholic bever-
ages. Dreiser’s use of Butler as well as having young Cowperwood share his
own youthful abstinence suggests the mixture of autobiography and biog-
raphy in The Financier. It also underscores Dreiser’s personal identification
with Yerkes (or Cowperwood) in spite of his financial abuse of the poor.15
Aileen Butler is based on Mary Adelaide Moore, the daughter of a Philadel-
phia chemist and the second Mrs. Yerkes, who was rumored to have vis-
ited Yerkes in the prison on Fairmount Avenue. The two wives of Yerkes
l i f e a f t e r t h e t i t a n i c
2 2 5
are also partly based on Dreiser’s first wife Jug (also older than her husband
and just as conservative as Cowperwood’s first wife) and Thelma Cudlipp,
whose youthfulness and sexual burnish seem to suggest the beautiful (if over-
fashionably dressed) Aileen.
Without Dreiser’s personal additions to the Yerkes story as well as his
fantasized identification with the hero, the plot would have been unbear-
ably stiª and documentary. As it is (even in its 1927 version), the novel is
drawn out with the irrelevant details Mencken at first complained about—