Flashback, December 1925: Dreiser’s ‘An American Tragedy’ Attacks Inequality

After a quarter-century of penury and pain, novelist Theodore Dreiser achieved greater critical acclaim and financial security than he’d ever known with An American Tragedy, published a century ago this month by Horace Liveright.

In his debut 25 years before, Sister Carrie (whose difficult birth I described in this post from last month) and four subsequent novels (Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier, The Titan, and The “Genius”), Dreiser had helped lead the literary genre of naturalism in the United States. 

But with An American Tragedy, the 54-year-old author launched a monumental assault on American inequality and the ills it bred—corruption, media sensationalism, restricted life choices, and criminality.

This new novel came at the end of a year in which two others were similarly critical of American materialism at the height of the Roaring Twenties. All remain uniquely relevant a century later.

The Pulitzer Prize winner for that year, Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, satirized how the pursuit of profit could corrode even the most seemingly pure of occupations: medicine. And, as I noted in this post from 17 years ago on the real-life crime that inspired An American Tragedy, Dreiser’s plot contained some of the same elements as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: a poor boy from the Midwest, stifled by his environment and longing for all that money can buy, meets the woman of his dreams, only to become emmeshed in a crime that leads to his death.

Reflecting his journalism background, Dreiser conducted extensive research, both on the 1908 trial and execution of Chester Gillette and two other sensational murder cases: Harry Thaw’s shooting of architect Stanford White and the poisoning of Roland Molineux  (which figured in a novel he ultimately put aside called The Rake). The latter two cases fed his interest in what has become ghoulish media fascination with true-crime stories.

For the Gillette case, Dreiser ended up touring with his mistress (and eventual second wife), Helen Patges Richardson, towns in upper New York state that figured in the tragedy, while he also drew on love letters (introduced as evidence at trial) by the defendant’s pregnant lover, factory girl Grace Brown. His narrative contains major parallels to the case, including:

*the same initials for Gillette and protagonist Clyde Griffiths;

*the accused’s background as a poor relation hoping to use his rich industrial uncle’s status to catapult into high society;

*Brown’s drowning death in a boat on a lake; and

*the ambiguity involving Gillette’s guilt (significant enough still to be debated a century later).

Dreiser told readers everything—and I mean everything—about what led Griffiths to his fateful date with Roberta Alden on the lake. More than a few readers have wished he had spared them all of this detail (and, in the 1926 parody “Compiling an American Tragedy: Suggestions as to How Theodore Dreiser Might Write His Next Human Document and Save Five Years’ Work,” humorist Robert Benchley had wicked fun with his incurable verbosity, too).

Actually, in one important chapter, Dreiser did decide to forego legwork. Only a month before publication, the novelist urged his friend and literary champion, the iconoclastic columnist and editor H.L. Mencken, to use his influence to get him a pass to death row on Sing Sing, so he could more realistically convey Griffith’s experience in awaiting execution.

Liveright was undoubtedly relieved when nothing came of the request and his much-put-upon author—who’d been battling censors, low funds, chronic nausea, and headaches as he struggled with the project—could put the manuscript to rest. Dreiser himself came to feel it all was a blessing in disguise, telling Mencken, “my imagination was better—(more true to the facts)—than what I saw.”

Much like John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, when it was brought to the big screen in the Fifties, An American Tragedy would be carefully condensed by an expert director-screenwriting team (in this case, George Stevens, Michael Wilson, and Harry Brown) as A Place in the Sun. But Dreiser’s sprawling novel could have benefited—as Steinbeck’s family saga eventually did in the early 1980s—with a mini-series that would have depicted how an upbringing shaped and misshaped a key character.

This latter point may have been the entry point for Dreiser into Griffiths. Dreiser’s family was Roman Catholic rather than Protestant evangelical like Clyde’s, but the author and his character both chafed against what they regarded as their parents’ religious fanaticism and how it left children rootless and helpless in an increasingly secular modern America:

“Clyde's parents had proved impractical in the matter of the future of their children. They did not understand the importance or the essential necessity for some form of practical or professional training for each and every one of their young ones. Instead, being wrapped up in the notion of evangelizing the world, they had neglected to keep their children in school in any one place. They had moved here and there, sometimes in the very midst of an advantageous school season, because of a larger and better religious field in which to work. And there were times when, the work proving highly unprofitable and Asa being unable to make much money at the two things he most understood—gardening and canvassing for one invention or another—they were quite without sufficient food or decent clothes, and the children could not go to school. In the face of such situations as these, whatever the children might think, Asa and his wife remained as optimistic as ever, or they insisted to themselves that they were, and had unwavering faith in the Lord and His intention to provide.”

Much like Gustave Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, Clyde is beset by a shallow imagination, leaving him prey to materialism and desire. Unlike the French novelist, Dreiser was incapable of compression or style.

Even so, An American Tragedy succeeds despite its graceless prose. In fact, George Orwell’s 1945 essay “Good Bad Books” insisted that, paradoxically, this grimly deterministic novel succeeded because of it, gaining something “from the clumsy long-winded manner in which it is written; detail is piled on detail, with almost no attempt at selection, and in the process an effect of terrible, grinding cruelty is slowly built up.”

For the remaining two decades of his life, Dreiser, a relentless critic of capitalism (indeed, he embraced Communism not long before he died), attempted what we would call “monetizing” or “leveraging” the novel that helped rescue him from a lifetime of grinding poverty, through stage and film adaptations. He did not see those efforts bear fruit in the classic A Place in the Sun. I will leave a discussion of that movie till 2026, in time for its 75^th anniversary.

Quote of the Day (George Orwell, on The Party’s ‘Final, Most Essential Command’)

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”—English novelist essayist Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell (1904-1950), 1984 (1949)

Quote of the Day (George Washington, on Disunity and ‘Arbitrary Power’)

“It is only in our United Character, as an Empire, that our Independance is acknowledged, that our power can be regarded or our Credit supported among foreign Nations—the Treaties of the European Powers with the United States of America will have no validity on a dissolution of the Union. We shall be left nearly in a State of Nature, or we may find by our own unhappy experience, that there is a natural and necessary progression from the extreme of Anarchy to the extreme of Tyranny, and that arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of Liberty abused to Licentiousness.”—George Washington (1732-1799), commander in chief of the Continental Army and first President of the United States, “Circular to the States,” June 8-21, 1783, on the National Archives’ “Founders Online” Website

He certainly had his faults, but George Washington has long held an honored place in this country’s history for his vision, wisdom, and integrity. 

The above quote demonstrates why, as does his example of renouncing power and returning to private life when he could easily have become a dictator.

Like many Americans, I have taken for granted that important documents like the above source from our nation’s past would not only be preserved but disseminated in digital form for all of us to ponder.

The way things are going, who knows what will be maintained anymore? Oh, you hadn’t heard that the Presidential administration that came to power in January is forcing out the top leadership at the National Archives?

This is as good a time as any to remember George Orwell’s warning about history in 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Quote of the Day (Neil Gaiman, on How Speculative Fiction Is Actually About the Present)

“People think, wrongly, that speculative fiction is about predicting the future, but it isn’t…What speculative fiction is really good at is not the future, but the present. Taking an aspect of it that troubles or is dangerous, and extending and extrapolating that aspect into something that allows the people of that time to see what they are doing from a different angle and from a different place. It’s cautionary.”— English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction, audio theatre, and films Neil Gaiman, “Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 and What Science Fiction Is and Does,” in The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (2016)

Gaiman references Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in his essay, but perhaps a better example of the speculative fiction genre is 1984. (In fact, George Orwell came up with the title by reversing the last two digits of the year in which he wrote the novel: 1948.)

The image accompanying this post comes from the movie adaptation of Orwell’s dystopian vision, released in, appropriately enough, 1984, starring John Hurt (pictured here) as Winston Smith.

The key to Orwell’s nightmare comes from this quotation from the novel: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Quote of the Day (George Orwell, on Totalitarianism and ‘The Continuous Alteration of the Past’)

“From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.”—English novelist and essayist Eric Blair, aka George Orwell (1903-1950), “Books v. Cigarettes,” originally published in 1946, later reprinted in Essays (Everyman Library, 2002)

George Orwell wrote these words with two totalitarian rulers in mind: Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Hitler’s dream of a thousand-year Reich crumbled at the end of WWII, and the Soviet Union that Stalin turned into a superpower collapsed from within more than 40 years later.

But Vladimir Putin has learned the lesson these two dictators taught about using fake history to control the present moment. He exploited fear and resentment over the loss of national power to manipulate his people.

Lucian Kim’s March 2022 article for the Wilson Center explored Putin’s “dangerous hobby”: a grasp of history “highly selective and distorted by politics” (a blueprint for control, I might add, that is increasingly envied, if not emulated, by Western proto-strongmen). Kim’s analysis of the Russian leader’s obsession with the wrong lessons of the past is best summed up with respect to Ukraine:

“If Russians are not allowed to condemn past crimes committed in their name, they will not be able to liberate themselves from the Soviet mindset. And as long as they are not free of the Soviet past, Russians will be unable to accept the paradox that the Soviet Union could be both liberator and occupier of half of Europe—and that they themselves were prisoners in their own country.”

(Jordan M. Poss’ blog post from May of last year contains another interesting reflection on “Orwell on History and ObjectiveTruth.”)

Quote of the Day (George Orwell, on Humor Hated by ‘The Rich, The Powerful and the Complacent’)

"The truth is that you cannot be memorably funny without at some point raising topics which the rich, the powerful and the complacent would prefer to see left alone." ― George Orwell, "Funny, But Not Vulgar,” originally printed in The Leader, 1945, reprinted in George Orwell: As I Please, 1943-1945, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (1968)

Quote of the Day (George Orwell, on How a Poem is Defended)

“There is no argument by which one can defend a poem. It defends itself by surviving, or it is indefensible.”— English novelist-essayist George Orwell (1904-1950), “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool,” in Polemic, No. 7, March 1947, reprinted in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: Volume 4, 1945-1950 (1968)

Flashback, August 1945: Orwell’s Long-Delayed ‘Animal Farm’ Satirizes Soviet Tyranny

Though now virtually a canonical text of the Cold War, Animal Farm initially encountered significant roadblocks to publication. Secker and Warburg, which released the satire by George Orwell 75 years ago this month, was the fifth house that the iconoclastic left-wing journalist had approached, only to be turned down—including for explicitly political reasons.

At Faber and Faber, poet-editor T.S. Eliot, after conferring with colleagues, informed Orwell although his writing was good, “We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time.”

Outside of the context of the original letter, Eliot’s rationale sounds opaque notes that readers of his poetry might appreciate. But Orwell had little trouble deciphering it, for elsewhere in the message, Eliot took note of the “Trotskyite” perspective of the narration. Anyone reading between the lines would immediately understand that this might upset a key partner in Great Britain’s “Grand Alliance” against Nazi Germany: Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Orwell conceived his devastating depiction of the Soviet Union as a failed utopia in the form of a beast fable about “Manor Farm”—so called because of the aristocrats who controlled it for years. The granular details of his allegory were inspired by time spent from 1936 to 1940 in a cottage in Wallington, near London, where the journalist kept chickens, goats and geese.

But, for contemporary readers, the primary interest of Orwell’s bitter satire—what led it to be banned in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries now falling under its sway—lay in characters whose motives, decisions and fates resembled the ideological battles among Socialists, Communists and the latter’s Trotskyite splinter faction. In particular, they were modeled on world-famous leaders of the prior three decades dating back to the Russian Revolution:

* Mr. Jones, the failing farmer whose misrule eventually leads to a revolt by his animals, stands for Czar Nicholas II of Russia, who was overthrown in 1917 and, with the rest of his family, put to death a year later;

* Old Major, the pig who organizes the animal revolt and insists on their equality, represents Vladimir Lenin—and, like the Bolshevik leader, dies before many of his ideas can become reality;

* Napoleon signifies Stalin—even to the point of being named for another dictator who used the chaotic aftermath of a revolution as a ladder to absolute power;

* Snowball, who loses out in a power struggle with Napoleon—and then is driven off the farm by dogs acting at the behest of the vengeful victor—is based on Leon Trotsky, who  was driven into exile by Stalin in 1929 and assassinated in Mexico on the dictator’s orders in 1940.

Swiftly, Orwell traces how his bestial revolutionaries become acclimated step by step to erosions of their freedom to the point where they yield to a Soviet-style cult of personality:

“It had become usual to give Napoleon the credit for every successful achievement and every stroke of good fortune. You would often hear one hen remark to another, ‘Under the guidance of our leader, Comrade Napoleon, I have laid five eggs in six days,’ or two cows, enjoying a drink at the pool, would exclaim, ‘Thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon, how excellent this water tastes!”

The infamous Moscow “show trials” of the mid-to-late Thirties, when a paranoid Stalin set in motion trumped-up charges against longtime major Communist Party leaders, are also evoked:

“They had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.”

With Napoleon amending to absurdity one of Old Major’s foundational principles (“All Animals Are Equal But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others”), Orwell anticipated a notion he would explore a few years later in greater depth in Nineteen Eighty-Four: doublethink, or indoctrination-induced acceptance of a patently false idea or of two ideas mutually contradictory to each other.

Orwell hinted in Animal Farm at the major enablers of the new absolutist regime in Europe: the silent intellectuals who could have sparked widespread dissent:

“Several of [the animals] would have protested if they could have found the right arguments. Even Boxer was vaguely troubled. He set his ears back, shook his forelock several times, and tried hard to marshal his thoughts; but in the end he could not think of anything to say.”

This bewilderment over the complicity of the intellectuals—first triggered by Orwell’s service with the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, when he was shocked into disillusionment by Stalinist purges in Barceleona—hardened into contempt as he attempted to find a publisher for his new satire.

To fulfill the obligations of a contract calling for the submission of his next two novels, Orwell sent the manuscript to the man who published his first nonfiction title, Down and Out in Paris in London: Victor Gollancz. The old-line left-wing publisher, who preferred to mute any of his own reservations about Stalinism, did not surprise Orwell in the least when he quickly rejected this satire.

Eliot’s refusal, less expected because it came from some with more conservative political and religious convictions, was more painful. But the turndown of the manuscript that provoked Orwell the most came at the hands of the British publisher Jonathan Cape, which had committed to accepting it until being warned off by a government official. Orwell included their timorous critique in the preface he eventually wrote for Animal Farm:

I mentioned the reaction I had from an important official in the Ministry of Information with regard to Animal Farm. I must confess that this expression of opinion has given me seriously to think … I can see now that it might be regarded as something which it was highly ill-advised to publish at the present time. If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of other dictatorships. Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste of the fable were not pigs. I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offense to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are.

Orwell did not name that “important official in the Ministry of Information,” but he had a hunch that this bureaucrat harbored pro-Soviet sentiments—a belief given concrete form in 1949, when the writer included him on a list given to a friend in Britain's Foreign Office of 38 intellectuals who were “crypto-communist fellow travelers or inclined that way.”

Although some names on that list emerged more from Orwell’s prejudices than any real fact, he was correct to be suspicious of Peter Smollett. Only in 1990, a decade after his death, with the brief opening of Soviet intelligence archives, was it confirmed that Smollett, a past London correspondent for several European papers, was in reality Hans-Peter Smolka, part of the Soviet spy ring centered around Kim Philby.

Smollett’s interference delayed publication of Animal Farm for a year, leaving Orwell smoldering enough to blast “the servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onwards.” It was safe to print criticisms of Prime Minister Winston Churchill during this period, but not the nation’s Soviet ally, he charged.

Orwell’s denunciation of these abject intellectuals has lost none of its bite with the passage of 75 years, nor has his eloquent defense of the right to advocate the unfashionable and inconvenient: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” 

Worn down by his struggle against tuberculosis, he would continue through the four years remaining to him to raise the alarm against threats to freedom, particularly in his last novel, when he dispensed with the fable form for a searing dystopian nightmare: Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Quote of the Day (George Orwell, on the State’s Inversion of Reality—or, ‘1984’ at 70)

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” ― George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

When it was published 70 years ago today published in London by Secker & Warburg, then five days later in New York, 1984 struck a chord in the Free World, a transatlantic alliance that, over the last two decades, had experienced the rise of totalitarian regimes. 

The dystopian fantasy from George Orwell took the real nightmares through which people had just lived to another level entirely: a world divided into three “spheres” (much as Orwell had feared that Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin were creating at the Teheran Conference in WWII). The three slogans in today’s “Quote of the Day” were carved into the walls of the “Ministry of Truth” in one of these “spheres,” Oceania.

During the years when the Soviet Union wrongly appeared to be not only on the march but unstoppable, 1984 was considered a spot-on critique of how such dictatorships could come to exercise complete tyranny of thought over the individual’s mind. 

Four decades later, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the defiance flung by Chinese students at their own aging rulers, the sense of urgency transmitted by Orwell had faded. The year 1984 had passed with no regime possessing anything like the hegemony he had imagined with such terrifying authenticity.

Rather than being an indispensable lever of dictatorship, as in the "telescreen," technology came to be seen as a weapon of defiance, perhaps best symbolized by the TV ad for Apple’s Macintosh. 

Typical of this new way of thinking was the characteristically sunny prediction by ex-President Ronald Reagan, after the Tiananmen Square massacre, that “the Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip.” 

How naïve we all were. Not only does the gerontocracy endure in China, but it has used the nation’s vast clout to persuade telecon companies not to push content opposed by the regime. From the flotsam of the USSR has emerged Vladimir Putin, who has applied the disinformation techniques he learned as a KGB officer to the social media, sowing confusion and division in the Western democracies he loathes. 

Even the United States has not proved impervious to the Big Lie that is the ultimate product of Orwell’s ironically named Ministry of Truth. Although the ubiquitous indoctrination that represents the final stage of this ministry’s thought control process has not yet arrived in America, the black arts of propaganda are flourishing in the highest office in the land. 

“Doublethink”—defined, in a penetrating essay on the novel by clinical psychologist Natalie Frank, as “the ability to hold two opposing ideas in one’s mind simultaneously” —is created by a President who calls climate change “a hoax” but whose company has used the phenomenon to press for constructing a seawall to guard against erosion at his golf course in Doonbeg, Ireland. 

That denial of what ordinary citizens can see and hear for themselves has been facilitated by adviser Kellyanne Conway coining the phrase “alternative facts” to justify the President’s silly insistence on record-setting crowd sizes for his inauguration; by personal attorney Rudy Giuliani claiming that “Truth isn’t truth”; and by their boss himself telling a crowd, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

For a novel that took root when Orwell grew enraged over Soviet agents discrediting Trotskyists in the Spanish government as fascist spies, then became bleaker as he fell victim, one cold winter on a Scottish island, to TB, 1984 has, not surprisingly, taken on unexpected relevance since January 20, 2017.  When the leaders of a democracy seek to rewrite its past and deny its present, they imperil its future.

For the citizenry manipulated by such leaders, it is all too sadly the case that “Ignorance is Strength.”

Quote of the Day (George Orwell, on Power and Control Over Time)

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

Quote of the Day (George Orwell, on Power and Temporary Invincibility)

“Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in London: and so on. This habit of mind leads also to the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end.”—British essayist/novelist George Orwell (1903-1950), “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” in The Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays, and Reportage (1961)