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 (H.L. Mencken, on ‘A New Fallacy in Politics’)

“[I]t is not the leadership that is old and decorous that fetches [the American], but the leadership that is new and extravagant. He will resist dictation out of the past, but he will follow a new messiah with almost Russian willingness, and into the wildest vagaries of economics, religion, morals and speech. A new fallacy in politics spreads faster in the United States than anywhere else on earth, and so does a new fashion in hats, or a new revelation of God, or a new means of killing time, or a new metaphor or piece of slang.”—American journalist, essayist, and philologist H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), The American Language: An Inquiry Into the Development of English in the United States (1919)

Quote of the Day (H.L. Mencken, on People Speaking)

“Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.”—American editor, columnist, and philologist H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing (1949)

Quote of the Day (H.L. Mencken, on What He Learned From Cops in His Youth)

“It took a young reporter a little while to learn how to read and interpret the reports that cops turned in, for they were couched in a special kind of English, with a spelling peculiar to itself. If a member of what was then called ‘the finest’ had spelled larceny in any way save larsensy, or arson in any way save arsony, or fracture in any way save fraxr, there would have been a considerable lifting of eyebrows….

“But…their innocence of literae humaniores was not necessarily a sign of stupidity, and from some of them, in fact, I learned the valuable lesson that sharp wits can lurk in unpolished skulls. I knew cops who were matches for the most learned and unscrupulous lawyers at the Baltimore bar, and others who had made monkeys of the oldest and crabbedest judges on the bench, and were generally respected for it. Moreover, I knew cops who were really first-rate policemen, and loved their trade as tenderly as so many art artists or movie actors.”—American editor, columnist, and philologist H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), “Recollections of Notable Cops (1900-1910),” in Newspaper Days: Mencken's Autobiography: 1899-1906 (1942)

The iconoclastic journalist H.L. Mencken died on this day in 1956, eight years after a stroke left him unable to read, write or speak. But before his condition forced him into retirement, he had written over 100,000 letters, 30 books, thousands of articles, daily diary entries—all while editing two magazines.

Those who read him hold forth on multiple topics with his high literary style were astonished to discover that he had never been to college. That might have accounted for part of the reason why this polymath had such respect for policemen—men whose street smarts continually enabled them to outwit educated elites.

Flashback, June 1920: Harding, Calling for ‘Normalcy,’ Nominated by GOP for Presidency

On the 10th ballot at the Republican National Convention in Chicago, with front-runners having pummeled each other silly and unbearable heat bearing down on the delegates, lovable lightweight Warren G. Harding emerged as the nominee 100 years ago this week. 

The victory climaxed a careful multi-month campaign that had achieved greater momentum four weeks earlier, when the U.S. Senator from Ohio called for a return to “normalcy” that would end progressive legislation domestically and intervention abroad.

For years, that reversion from government activism, along with a scandal-plagued administration, led largely liberal historians to place Harding among the lowest rung of Presidents. 

In the last two decades, vigorously contrarian (and often conservative) scholars, tapping papers long (and wrongly) believed destroyed by the President's widow, challenged that assessment. That may have raised Harding’s standing somewhat, but he is still unlikely to rank among good or even fair Presidents.

But Harding’s quest for the nomination is one area where the revisionists offer a more nuanced approach to our understanding of the forces that propelled him to the Presidency. In particular, a 2004 biography by John Dean of Watergate fame persuasively argued that, rather than being simply a favorite-son or dark-horse candidate who caught lightning in a bottle, Harding had shrewdly positioned himself as an acceptable second or third alternative to better-known candidates who could not secure the nomination.

For at least the last four decades, national conventions have been scripted down to the minute. It was a far cry from what held sway through much of the 19th and 20th centuries. (In 1924, the Democrats went to 103 ballots before staggering out of New York with a compromise candidate, John W. Davis--who still lost that fall overwhelmingly.)

In 1920, bitter internecine warfare engulfed the three GOP front-runners: Gen. Leonard Wood, Gov. Frank Lowden and Sen. Hiram Johnson. On the eve of the convention, a campaign finance scandal damaged Wood and Lowden. However, Johnson was unable to pick up their delegates, as he was blamed for pushing the Senate probe about his two opponents. 

That paved the way for the success of the strategy created by Harding’s campaign manager and friend, Harry Daugherty—i.e., secure commitments from delegates in the rival camps to back Harding if their own candidate couldn’t break a convention deadlock. 

Harding enjoyed several other advantages when he came to Chicago with his family, including a moderately conservative record that appealed to important businessmen who backed the party; an amiable personality that seldom if ever alienated anyone; a wife who played an unprecedented role behind the scenes and before the media; a wide-open field following the death of Theodore Roosevelt a year and a half before; and a handsome appearance that led more than one of his supporters to think that he “looked like a President.”

Daugherty secured the nomination for his Ohio buddy following sleepless, frantic deliberations the night before in a 13^th-floor suite of the Blackstone Hotel—giving rise to the term “smoke-filled room” to suggest party bosses secretly selecting nominees without taking into account the wishes of primary voters. 

Dean disputes the efficacy of that meeting, noting that nothing had been decided in these freewheeling discussions that night and that the real coup was pulled off the next morning on the convention floor by Daugherty’s forces. But clearly, some crucial minds were changed by what went on in that suite.

The second person to whom Harding owed his victory was his wife, Florence Kling Harding, who had been instrumental in his success as a newspaper editor and politician. 

In the lead-up to the convention, the formidable “Duchess” had convinced her husband to stay the course after he had suffered two disastrous primary defeats. At the convention itself, as detailed by biographer Carl S. Anthony, she “openly engaged the male political reporters covering the deadlocked convention with remarks that, for all intents and purposes, served as the blueprint for candidates’ spouse convention speeches many generations in the future.”

But, as the ultimate prize appeared within her husband’s grasp, Mrs. Harding was not as happy as might be expected. “I can see but one word written over the head of my husband, if he is elected, and that word is ‘tragedy,’” she told reporters. 

What caused her concern? She was certainly familiar with her husband’s limited intelligence and his vulnerability to charlatans who took advantage of his too-trusting nature (both of which paved the way for the Teapot Dome scandal that undermined his reputation after his death). 

But some of the unease stemmed from her conversation with a Washington fortune-teller who predicted that her husband would make it to the Oval Office—then die there by “sudden, violent, peculiar death by poison”—which, in one sense, did happen three years later, when one of Warren’s doctors accidentally hastened his death by prescribing purgatives that aggravated his cardiac condition.

But that remained far in the distance in the fall of 1920, when Harding benefited from an electorate exhausted from World War I and Woodrow Wilson’s battle with the GOP-controlled Senate over the League of Nations, as well as a recession that began under the Democrat. 

Still, a major obstacle loomed. In order to clear the path to Harding’s victory in November, the Republican National Committee paid his longtime mistress, Carrie Phillips, to go on a long trip to Asia so she would be unavailable to reporters who might discover her relationship with the nominee, as well as her oft-voiced sympathy for Germany during the war. She continued to be paid a yearly stipend by the GOP to assure her silence until her death in 1960. 

(Due to litigation by Phillips' daughter and two of Harding's nephews, the President's erotic, pseudo-poetic correspondence with his paramour was not released by the Library of Congress until 2014.)

GOP leaders were unaware of yet another of Harding’s dangerous liaisons, this time with Nan Britton, two decades younger than Phillips and three decades younger than the nominee. By the time of the convention, she was eight months pregnant with his child—and, unlike Phillips, would continue her relationship with Harding when he reached the White House.  Her revelation of their relationship in a 1931 tell-all--long denied by Harding loyalists--was finally confirmed by DNA testing in 2015.

Dean, Amity Schlaes and Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh have argued in recent years that Harding is underrated as a President, pointing to moderate views on race and his successfully attempt to revive the economy. 

But their reassessment, while an important correction to the record, only carries so much weight, as Harding's racial views were squarely in mainstream Republican thought at the time and never really challenged his base; important sections of the economy—notably, agriculture—did not benefit from the boom of the Twenties; and the President remained, intellectually, a featherweight.

Moreover, for all his work in journalism, Harding continually offered up some of the most gaseous political rhetoric ever produced in the White House. With memorable invective, newspaper columnist and editor H.L. Mencken summed up Harding’s style as "Gamalielese" (a play on the President's middle name):

“He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

This Day in Literary History (William Dean Howells, Near-Forgotten ‘Dean of American Letters,’ Dies)

May 11, 1920-- William Dean Howells, dubbed “Dean of American Letters” for his exploration of multiple genres and his influence as a critic and editor on the nation’s literature, died in his sleep in New York City at age 83.

The prior decade had seen the passing of Howells’ two great but very dissimilar friends, Henry James and Mark Twain. At the peak of his influence and popularity, Howells’ fiction had been ranked alongside theirs as exemplars of a realistic school decidedly at odds with the romantic novels more favored by American publishers in the early post-Civil War period.

But the century since his death has been kinder to the two writers that Howells championed than to the editor-novelist himself. While Twain continues to be studied for introducing native vernacular to American literature and James is celebrated for his pioneering psychological insights into characters’ motivations, Howells is seen as conventional, even something of an old fogy.

Four writers—a novelist and three critics— might be said to have interred Howells’ reputation. The first, biographer Van Wyck Brooks, did not wait even a year before his death before criticizing him (and Twain’s wife Libby) in The Ordeal of Mark Twain for reining in his rude, ribald genius with their own puritanism and prudery. 

H.L. Mencken picked up on this theme, inveighing against Howells, with characteristic invective, for churning out "a long row of uninspired and hollow books" and acting like a “somewhat kittenish old maid."

Many listeners in 1930 might have been mistakenly heard the voice of Mencken in that of the Nobel Literature laureate that year, Sinclair Lewis, who picked up Mencken’s rhetorical tropes and fairly ran with them. The rise of Howells, Lewis charged in his lecture, had represented for American literature “something like a standard, and a very bad standard it was”:

“Mr. Howells was one of the gentlest, sweetest, and most honest of men, but he had the code of a pious old maid whose greatest delight was to have tea at the vicarage. He abhorred not only profanity and obscenity but all of what H. G. Wells has called ‘the jolly coarsenesses of life.’ In his fantastic vision of life, which he innocently conceived to be realistic, farmers, and seamen and factory hands might exist, but the farmer must never be covered with muck, the seaman must never roll out bawdy chanteys, the factory hand must be thankful to his good kind employer, and all of them must long for the opportunity to visit Florence and smile gently at the quaintness of the beggars.”

The evisceration of Howells was effectively completed a generation later in 27-year-old Alfred Kazin’s sweeping study of American prose from the 1890s through 1940, On Native Grounds. The opening chapter uses Howell as the central figure against which virtually an entire new genre, the naturalists and their successors: “he was a monumental example of the antiquated nineteenth-century conscience upon which a new order of society had placed an intolerable burden.”

Literary reputation is a fleeting thing—and ironically, even the four men who did so much to take down Howells do not stand up so well as they once did. At the same time, if Howells has not reacquired his once-exalted status, a more respectful tone has crept into evaluations of his work. 

Historian Richard White, for instance, used Howells as a voice to try to make sense of the squalling Industrial Age in his book, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865‒1896. His Howells is less prudish than ambivalent, an observer too thoughtful to miss in his novels and magazine columns the injustices of his time but too perplexed by them all to offer a corrective to them. 

The best way to ensure a writer is read is to make sure he is assigned to students. Though Howells’ most influential novels (from 1875 through 1888) can be found in a two-volume Library of America series, I doubt if more than a few students have gone beyond even one: The Rise of Silas Lapham. But if you have to start somewhere with him, it might as well be here. 

Less buffoonish than Lewis’ George Babbitt, less brutal than Theodore Dreiser’s Frank Cowperwood, Lapham is also more thoroughly recognizable and human. Proud, boastful, eager to maintain his place in society, this businessman lets his greed get the better of him. The “rise” in the title is actually ironic: His realization of his folly and determination to live for others following the collapse of his fortunes produces a moral, rather than financial, elevation.

Quote of the Day (H.L. Mencken, on Film a Century Ago, in Its ‘Wild West’ Stage)

“The movies are still in the Wild West stage of culture. They have yet to produce any authentic artists, or such an artist could not endure the kind of life nearly all movie people have to lead. The great magnates of the movie world would strike him precisely as a Hearst or a Harmsworth strikes a man of letters, or the sales agent of a phonograph company a composer of good music. It may be suggested here that perhaps Wagner was an exception—that he showed certain tastes that recall those of a movie star. But it must be manifest on reflection that there was actually a vast difference between the society of even a crazy king and that of a movie magnate, and an even vaster one between the atmosphere of Triebschen or Bayreuth, even with Cosima in the house, and that of Hollywood.” —American journalist, essayist, and philologist H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), Minority Report: H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks (1956)

Reading the notebook entries of H.L. Mencken was something of a letdown for me. The material he poured into his columns and books in his lifetime featured his funniest, most erudite thoughts. The notebooks featured his darkest, most bilious meditations on religion, democracy and racial and ethnic groups he did judged as falling outside the cultural elite.

The passage I am highlighting here differs from his other, more dispiriting private ideas. At the height of Mencken’s influence, in the Roaring Twenties, movies were coming into their own as a mass medium. But, even with his often piercing insight into culture, he couldn’t see that early filmmakers were not only pioneering a new kind of visual medium, but a new kind of storytelling. 

Moreover, he missed parallels to his hero Richard Wagner that went beyond personal taste or loutish lifestyle. Just as the German was pushing the boundaries of musical theater with his operas, so were early Hollywood directors inventing a new kind of vocabulary to depict emotion. And, just as Wagner sought to build new arenas that could incorporate his ideas on musical drama, Hollywood was developing an entire apparatus for its new dream machine—movie theaters, projectors, elaborate backdrops for scenes, and even the coming of sound.

The new vocabulary and forms developed in the Twenties were quickly copied across continents. We saw the culmination of this process on Sunday night, when Parasite became the first foreign-language film to receive the Best Picture Oscar. One wonders what Mencken would have made of all of this.