2 6 9
grave ear to quackeries [i.e., the socialist theories of his Greenwich Vil-
lage compatriots], snorting and eye-rolling with the best of them.”
Mencken had probably done more as a critic for Dreiser’s career than any-
one else. But ever since his review of Jennie Gerhardt, the cracks in his
praise had begun to show and then widen. Mencken felt more and more
that Dreiser considered him his protégé more than his literary equal, even
after he had come into his own prominence as a writer.65 Whatever the mo-
tive, Mencken’s pronouncements have had their negative impact on biog-
raphies and criticism to this day.
t h e g e n i u s h i m s e l f
2 7 0
t w e l v e
Back to the Future
–
Your own last letter is full of the same sweet song. Floyd Dell
has written a novel which strips me of all my alleged laurels.
Sherwood Anderson the same. Sinclair Lewis the same. Ben Hecht
the same. . . . Seriously, I get just a little tired of all this
silly palaver about the great American novel.
D R E I S E R T O H O R A C E L I V E R I G H T, N O V E M B E R 2 8 , 1 9 2 0
with the “genius” in limbo throughout 1917 and America edging closer
and closer to war, Dreiser’s anger with his country’s puritanical ways
mounted steadily. His anti-British attitude hardened, and the socialist views
that would formalize by the 1930s took root during the war years (by their
end, for example, he favored state control of public utilities), and the treat-
ment of The “Genius” by the Anglo-American literary establishment as one
more German atrocity still rankled. Mencken, who had gone to Europe
at the end of 1916 for several weeks to report on the war, returned home
the following spring to anti-German mobs roaming the streets of Baltimore.
The United States would enter the global contest on April 7, 1917.1 That year
the Espionage Act was passed and the Sedition Act a year later, both reflect-
ing America’s anti-German sentiment. The teaching of German was sum-
marily halted in many of the nation’s high schools and colleges. Symphonies
dared not play Wagner or Beethoven, and conspiracy theories abounded,
leading to beatings of German-Americans and at least one lynching. This
wartime xenophobia soon targeted labor agitators and socialists whose re-
sistance to a “capitalistic war” branded them pro-German.2 As America went
to war abroad, it began to fight a cultural and economic one at home.
In “Life, Art and America,” an essay published in February in Seven Arts,
Dreiser began with a literary and cultural criticism of America and ended
up almost dismissing the nation altogether. Not only did the forces of con-
2 7 1
ventionality curtail artistic freedom and suppress realistic depictions of life,
he thought, but America had failed to protect its citizens from a commer-
cial oligarchy that eªectively began at Plymouth Rock with the exploita-
tion of the Indians and continued to the present in the form of the many
trusts that trampled upon the rights of the average citizen. “Take, for in-
stance, the tobacco trust, the oil trust, the milk trust, the coal trust—in
what way do you suppose they help?” Interested mainly in material profit
and technological advancement, America had produced no philosophers
of the first rank—no Spencer, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, or Kant. (The re-
ception of this screed was probably not advanced by the fact that three of
these philosophers happened to be German.) “Do I hear some one oªer-
ing Emerson as an equivalent? Or [William] James?” As for artists, neither
Emerson nor the other James was worthy of the foreign competition. Only
Whitman and (incredibly) Edgar Lee Masters rose to the test. The prob-
lem lay in the fact that American censorship—Comstockery that had only
recently enjoyed the force of law—suppressed not only literature but all
forms of expression. Even the colleges and universities conspired to keep
America conventionally minded and artistically mediocre. “The average
American school, college, university, institution,” he protested, “is as much
against the development of the individual, in the true sense of that word,
as any sect or religion.”3
Perhaps he had in mind Professor Sherman’s recent attack upon his work
or the more distant example of some of his more pedantic professors at In-
diana State College who figure in Dawn. (By then his uncut autobiography
had sprawled to include what would become a second volume, ultimately
titled Newspaper Days. ) Yet he found conspiracies against the individual and
indeed nature itself in all walks of American life. Soon he would write an-
other one-act play, an overworked satire—unpublishable until it was included
in his 1920 book of philosophical essays, Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub— on the
forces of censorship in 1918. In “The Court of Progress,” the descendants of
the era’s opponents of contraception and saloons, examiners of lewd books,
and so on meet to celebrate their vice-free society in monotonous and un-
ending chants. In “Mr. Bottom,” an excerpt from “Life, Art and America”
that was published in The Social War, one of several progressive publications
Dreiser would come to frequent, he mockingly likened the Anglo-Saxon tem-
perament in America to the rude mechanic who wakes up an ass in Shake-
speare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In an essay in Pep, another such mag-
azine, and reprinted in the New York Call, he criticized the American press
for its part in the oppression of free speech and honest representation.4
b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e
2 7 2
Seven Arts was shut down later that year for violation of the Espionage
Act, mainly because of antiwar articles by Randolph Bourne. Under the new
law, its issues could no longer legally be mailed, but if its doom hadn’t al-
ready been sealed, Dreiser’s next complaint, “American Idealism and Ger-
man Frightfulness,” would have instantly accomplished it. To this day, it has
never been published, and the manuscript is now missing from the Dreiser
archive at the University of Pennsylvania, but three previous biographers and
other critics either paraphrase or quote from it (or each other). Longer than
“Life, Art and America” at over 10,000 words, this article—according to
Robert H. Elias—“compared Germany’s liberal domestic legislation with
England’s practices and so attacked the British that no editor would print it
for fear of being charged with giving aid and comfort to the enemy and pub-
lishing a plea for violence against the United States Government.”5
In fact, Waldo Frank and James Oppenheim, the co-editors of Seven Arts,
had been eager to publish the article in their August issue, saying that this
was “no time for putting oª present impulses and the expression of present
convictions.” “American Idealism and German Frightfulness,” they insisted,
was “the logical next lead-up in the fight.” In July Dreiser wrote from West-
minster, Maryland, where he was visiting with Estelle, that he couldn’t part
with it for less than $75 or $100. He even suggested that “a banker like Her-
man Bahr . . . or some of his pro-German members of the Aryan club or
the Staats-Zeitung would furnish [a more eªective] means for distributing
it—not so much because it is pro-German—it is not—as because it is anti-
British and pro-American.” Since they had furnished Dreiser with five hun-
dred oªprints of “Art, Life and America,” the editors of Seven Arts must
have been taken aback by this slight upon their circulation eªorts. More-
over, Dreiser’s suggestion that they associate with German sympathizers
instead of merely antiwar activists ultimately frightened them oª. Waldo
reneged on the oªer of publication, saying blandly that “Your criticisms of
England are based not so much on her intrinsic faults as on the fact that
she is England.”6 The essay was subsequently rejected by Century and North
American Review.
One of the last important things published by Seven Arts was Mencken’s
“The Dreiser Bugaboo,” which set out to fend oª Dreiser’s puritanical crit-
ics but also insinuated that their continued attack upon him would distract
him from his best work and transform him into a professional revolution-
ary.7 This idea, along with the caricature of his friend as the “Indiana peas-
ant,” was repeated and expanded in the essay on Dreiser in A Book of Pref-
aces. Neither essay broke their friendship, but the bonds were weakened.
b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e
2 7 3
While A Book of Prefaces was under consideration at John Lane, one of its
editors urged Dreiser to ask Mencken to modify his estimate, but, as Dreiser
recorded in his diary for August 13, “I can’t influence Mencken. Get the
blues from this. Bert [Estelle Kubitz] adds to them by saying that such a