The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

Chester may have been interested in this option, but Grace insisted that he

marry her. It was a time in America when both abortions and the publica-

tion of birth control information were criminal oªenses. Dreiser, as we have

noted, supported Margaret Sanger’s position on birth control and may have

seen the moral and social aspects of Clyde’s dilemma as important subis-

sues to the theme of the young man’s helplessness as a pawn of nature and

society. Had Clyde been part of a more powerful class, he could have found

an abortionist as one of his defense lawyers had done in his more privileged

youth. Gillette “merely wished to divest himself of the poorer relationship

in order to achieve the richer one,” Dreiser later wrote of the case. “And

you may depend upon it that if he had had money and more experience in

the ways of immorality, he would have known ways and means of indulging

himself in the relationship with Billy Brown without bringing upon him-

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self the morally compulsive relation of prospective fatherhood.”3 As Dreiser

saw it, Clyde was merely acting according to social norm by wanting to

better himself by marrying a rich girl. Because of chance (and a lack of birth

control information), Roberta had become an obstacle to the fulfillment

of this American Dream, the same fantasy of marrying into a rich family

that Dreiser himself admitted in his autobiography to sharing as a young

man.

Once Chester had returned to Cortland from a Fourth of July weekend

at Lake Skaneateles with Harriet Benedict and her friends, Grace told him:

“I am writing to tell you I am coming back to Cortland. I simply can’t stay

here any longer. Mama worries and wonders why I cry so much, and I am

just about sick. Please come and take me away some place, dear.” Dreiser

has Roberta write almost the same words.4 Not wanting to expose himself

to her parents in South Otselic or his connection to Grace in Cortland,

Chester met her in DeRuyter, where the fated couple took a train to Utica.

They left the Tabor Hotel the next day without paying and took another

train north to the Adirondacks and Tupper Lake, where they spent their

second night together. They found this resort not to their liking, however,

and retraced their journey back down to the then relatively secluded Big

Moose Lake. Here, at the Glenmore Hotel, Chester registered as Carl Gra-

ham of Albany. Clyde takes the same name when he and Roberta register

at a similar hotel at Big Bittern. That afternoon Chester and Grace rented

a boat, indicating that they planned to return for dinner around six and

then take the train south for home. They left Grace’s suitcase at the hotel,

while taking Chester’s because it allegedly contained their packed lunch.

Chester also took along, strapped to the side of his valise with the initials

“CG,” the tennis racket which he was accused of using to strike Grace un-

conscious before she fell into the water and drowned.

Chester maintained his innocence at his murder trial, claiming that Grace

committed suicide by throwing herself in the water when he announced

that they would have to tell her parents about the pregnancy. He main-

tained that his alias at the Glenmore had been designed to protect Grace

in her shameful state. But he had already given three diªerent and conflict-

ing stories upon his arrest at a nearby lake where he had gone to meet his

society friends immediately following the drowning, and the fact that he

hadn’t saved her from drowning (not a crime in itself before Good Samar-

itan laws) reinforced the jury’s notion of his guilt. There were a number of

incidental witnesses who remembered seeing the two traveling together, but

the most damaging witness against him was Grace Brown herself. The

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3 0 0

Herkimer County District Attorney, George W. Ward, whipped up senti-

ment by reading fourteen of her pleading letters in court and afterward al-

lowing them to be published in the New York World. The prosecutor was

then running for county judge and hoped a victory in such a widely re-

ported trial would guarantee his political victory. There was also the testi-

mony of five physicians (later denounced by the defense as conspirators for

the prosecution) that a blow on the head had rendered her unconscious be-

fore she went into the water. Chester was found guilty of first-degree mur-

der by the jury after four hours’ deliberation in which only one juror had

held out for acquittal. He was convicted solely on circumstantial evidence,

but Grace’s letters overwhelmed the case and rendered the accused ipso facto

guilty not only of murder but of the moral crimes of fornication and se-

duction. Gillette, whose court-appointed counsel was assigned late in the

indictment process, was executed on March 30, 1908.5

The circus atmosphere of the trial must have reminded Dreiser of the

festive nature of the black lynchings he had seen and read about while work-

ing as a reporter in St. Louis. Clyde, as he envisioned him, was simply a

white “nigger,” not too diªerent from his brother Rome, who had also

worked for the railroad and drifted around the country. Dreiser may have

followed the Gillette-Brown case as it unfolded in the newspapers in the

fall of 1906. For it suggested not only the tragic reverse of the American

Dream, but the emergence of a social category noted for its “conspicuous

consumption” in Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), with

which Dreiser was obviously familiar.6 Clyde’s Lycurgus cousins and their

set, including Sondra, have few responsibilities and unlimited time on their

hands for boating, dancing, driving, and late-night parties and dinners at

their parents’ richly appointed residences in the city and vacation homes

on lakes in the North Woods. Because it is somewhat unrealistic that such

a Rome-like figure gains unqualified entry into this world, Dreiser carefully

established that Sondra’s initial interest in Clyde is based on her frustration

that his look-alike cousin Gilbert was ignoring her.

Dreiser seems to alternate the setting of this crime story between the

post-Victorian era of 1906 and the liberated 1920s, when the crass con-

sumerism noted in Veblen had reached its pinnacle in the wake of the Great

War and the era of Prohibition, ushered in on January 1, 1920. There is

the omnipresence of the automobile (killing the child in Kansas City and

setting Clyde on his tragic odyssey), which makes it clear that this is a

highly mobile society, no longer dependent on the train. Yet Clyde and

Roberta, being poor, do still depend upon it. Dreiser, the author of The

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3 0 1

Financier and The Titan, certainly knew how to write a documentary novel.

But in An American Tragedy, while depending on the facts of an actual

crime, he deliberately blurred the historical moment. For the problem

dramatized in his novel did not belong exclusively to the twenties, but to

the preceding thirty or so years, in which he had first become conscious

of the painful contrast between wealth and poverty in America set in mo-

tion after the Civil War by the economic plundering of the Robber Barons.

“It was in 1892, at a time I began work as a newspaper man,” Dreiser wrote

in 1934, “that I first began to observe a certain type of crime in the United

States. It seemed to spring from the fact that almost every young person

was possessed of an ingrowing ambition to be somebody financially and

socially. . . . I was witnessing the upbuilding of the great American for-

tunes. And once these fortunes and the families which controlled them

were established, there began to develop our ‘leisure class,’ the Four Hun-

dred [families] of New York . . . , plus their imitators in the remainder of

the states.”7

In an early draft of An American Tragedy, Clyde arrives in Lycurgus in 1919.

Yet there is no direct indication of World War I and its devastating eªects

on the morals of the nation as there is in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,

though the two novels were published in the same year. (Dreiser, inciden-

tally, met and snubbed Fitzgerald in the winter of 1923 at a party at the St.

Luke’s Place apartment he had taken on his return to New York.)8 Today’s

readers are surprised to hear that the two appeared in the same year, that

Dreiser’s novel wasn’t published earlier. Both Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby

in Fitzgerald’s novel have served in the war (while Tom Buchanan appar-

ently has not), but nobody in An American Tragedy seems to have ever heard