A Mayor and His People

Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945)
From Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, Twelve Men

Interesting Links

“Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie: America’s pure product and the gift of a young virgin” (Anne Trubek, Library of America)

“The ‘tragedy of desire’ in An American Tragedy and A Place in the Sun” (Imogen Sara Smith, The Moviegoer)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Village Feudists,” Theodore Dreiser
• “The Need of Money,” Booth Tarkington
• “Miss McEnders,” Kate Chopin

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Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, Twelve Men
1,168 pages
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $32.00

Hand-colored photographic postcard of Bridgeport, Connecticut, looking north up Main Street. Photograph by local bookseller and publisher Horace H. Jackson, c. 1900. Postcard produced c. 1907.

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With rare exception, the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, during the nineteenth century was not an incubator of well-known career politicians. Circus magnate and state legislator P. T. Barnum served as mayor for a single one-year term in 1875–76 and was largely responsible for creation of Bridgeport Hospital; another former mayor, local banker Daniel Nash Morgan, rose on the national stage to become Treasurer of the United States during the second administration of Grover Cleveland. Otherwise, the mayoral office had often rotated among city leaders—most of them regional businessmen who regarded their roles as largely honorific. As in many American cities, the position was a source of opportunities to award lucrative contracts and other favors to friends and colleagues.

In 1897, however, voters elected Thomas P. Taylor, a prominent Republican businessman who employed nearly 800 workers in his factory of women’s clothing (particularly bustles, corsets, hoop skirts, and such), children’s underwear, and paper cartons. Bridgeport had grown from fewer than 30,000 residents in 1880 to more than 70,000 by the end of the century, and strains on municipal infrastructure were beginning to show. Somewhat to the dismay of his fellow industrialists, Taylor embarked on a reform program of open-bid capital improvements and requested a series of bonds to fund them: $200,000 for sewer construction, $100,000 for paving city roads; $300,000 for new municipal buildings; $100,000 for new public schools, and $135,000 for the first Yellow Mill drawbridge, destined to become an essential thoroughfare for the rapidly growing city. After a single two-year term, many of his recommendations had been approved and were underway; he chose not to run for re-election and returned to managing his burgeoning factory. After he left office, the Bridgeport Telegram published a glowing tribute:

In the conduct of his office, Mayor Taylor has found his own party arrayed against him in many matters, but he has recognized no machine rule and has sailed the course mapped out by the compass of conviction. The world honors such a man. The opportunity for corruption in politics offers itself in cities the size of Bridgeport, but no man can honestly say that Thomas P. Taylor has been a party to questionable transactions, or that he has failed to conduct the affairs of his office in a fearless manner, calculated to work to the best interests of this city.

Theodore Dreiser encountered Taylor in 1898 and met up with him again in either 1900 or 1901, when they discussed the successes and failures of Taylor’s two years in office. The interview inspired Dreiser to write “A Mayor and His People,” a largely fictionalized profile of a man who becomes mayor and struggles against local interests to work entirely for the public good. In Dreiser’s hands, the capitalist manufacturer becomes a socialist shoe-factory worker, and Taylor’s single term as mayor becomes two terms followed by an election loss when business interests conspire against him. If Taylor ever read the piece, it seems improbable he would have even realized that he was the man depicted in the story.

Dreiser initially submitted the article to McClure’s, and Lincoln Steffens, a journalist who was then working as an editor at the magazine, didn’t know what to make of it. He returned the piece to Dreiser and told him to rewrite it as “either a definite account of the facts or a fiction story. . . . As it stands, it is neither one nor the other.” Steffens had accurately diagnosed the problem; at the time, Dreiser was losing interest in journalism and was instead turning his attention to fiction. He had just published his first novel, Sister Carrie, and despaired that if he continued publishing reportorial work in the magazines, he would become “an Ida Tarbell, a Ray Stannard Baker, a Lincoln Steffens."

After both McClure’s and Ainslee’s rejected “A Mayor and His People,” Dreiser sold it to The Era Magazine, a progressive monthly published in Philadelphia. In 1919, he included it in Twelve Men, a collection of prose portraits of good Samaritans and individualists Dreiser had profiled over the previous two decades. The first six essays feature acquaintances regarded by Dreiser as successful; “A Mayor and His People” appears with the final six, men who were failures despite their virtues. Taylor had died in 1913, and Dreiser extensively revised the piece for the book, incorporating additional fictional elements and moving the location to Massachusetts. He also changed the tone of the account; while the original story ended with a note of optimism and a hint that the former mayor might soon return to public life, the book version is far more cynical, and the hero is ultimately trampled by interests arrayed against the working class. Of the twelve profiles in the book, “A Mayor and His People” is arguably the least successful as a work of journalism or even as social commentary; its interest to readers is primarily as a short story dealing with themes that would pervade Dreiser’s fiction. In 1929 the esteemed American editor Blanche Colton Williams would even include it in her anthology Short Stories for College Classes.

Although Dreiser seems to have been unaware of it, life in the city of Bridgeport appears to have subsequently imitated art. In November 1901, weeks after Dreiser sent the article to McClure’s, Denis Mulvihill, a 58-year-old Irish immigrant and one of the stokers at a sewing machine factory (or, as The New York Times put it, a “coal shoveler”), was elected mayor of Bridgeport. Mulvihill had served as an alderman during Taylor’s term as mayor and, although he was a Democrat, he wholeheartedly supported and defended the Republican’s program of public works. “Mayor Taylor brought no politics with him into the City Hall, and neither did I,” he told a reporter. “That was the reason we stood together. He was honest.” Mulvihill also railed against the corruption and graft that had returned to Bridgeport in the two years since Taylor left office: “I think the greatest burden upon cities is the creation of unnecessary offices for political favorites who do not want to work for their living. . . . The idea of municipal ownership of gas works, water works, electric lights, and street railways is a good one, but the trouble is that politics would creep in, and political leaders would be wanting to secure offices for men who had no right to them.” A hero of the city’s working class, Mulvihill proved to be a popular mayor, and he was handily reelected for a second term—and one of his principal advisors during both administrations was Thomas Taylor himself.

Lincoln Steffens’s remarks to Dreiser, above, and Dreiser’s comments about his disenchantment with journalism are quoted in Richard Lingeman’s biography Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City.

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