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

Buy the book
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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Here is the story of an individual whose political and social example, if such things are ever worth anything (the moralists to the contrary notwithstanding), should have been, at the time, of the greatest importance to every citizen of the United States. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

A Traveler at Forty: Paris!

Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945)
From Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology

Interesting Links

“Dreiser’s Critical Reputation” (Donald Pizer, Dreiser Web Source)

“Theodore Dreiser’s New York” (Mike Wallace, The Paris Review)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “W. L. S.,” Theodore Dreiser
• “Mon Amie,” Randolph Bourne
• “Playing Courier,” Mark Twain

Buy the book
Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology
Hardcover | 613 pages
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $28.00

“One of the thousands upon thousands of cafés on the boulevards of Paris.” Pen and ink illustration by American artist William James Glackens (1870–1938) for Dreiser’s essay on Paris in the October 1913 issue of Century Magazine; reproduced in Dreiser’s book A Traveler at Forty, published later that same year.

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“I have been very fortunate in having about me . . . a group of friends who believe in me and who have been interested in my writing,” Theodore Dreiser told an interviewer in 1913. “Without my friends probably I should never have written at all.” One such friend was English publisher Grant Richards, to whom Dreiser sent, in 1908, chapters from his novel-in-progress, Jennie Gerhardt. Richards replied favorably and suggested that the author visit England. Although Richards would be disappointed when Harper & Brothers opted to distribute the novel on both sides of the Atlantic, he repeated his invitation to Dreiser over breakfast in New York in November 1911 (shortly after the book was published):

You will come to my house in England; you will stay there a few days; then I shall take you to London and put you up at a very good hotel. You will stay there until January first and then we shall go to the south of France: Nice, the Riviera, Monte Carlo; from there you will go to Rome, to Paris, where I shall join you, and then sometime in the spring or summer, when you have all your notes, you will return to London or New York and write your impressions and I will see that they are published!

In fact, Dreiser had been hoping to go to Europe—for research as well as pleasure. He needed to continue his investigations into the life of streetcar tycoon Charles Tyson Yerkes, the basis for the protagonist Frank Cowperwood in a trilogy of novels: The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (published posthumously in 1947). He had also been mulling over the idea of moving to London, since he felt that American critics and readers had not given him the attention he deserved. “It seems almost impossible to make my fellow Americans understand that I am alive,” he wrote Richards. “Once there I will get at least an equal run with [British novelists] Robert Hichens and Arnold Bennett over here.”

Dreiser seemed doubtful, however, about Richards’s promise to help him pay for the trip—yet the Englishman came through. First, he convinced Frank Scott, the president of the Century publishing company, to pay Dreiser a $1,000 advance for three travel articles for its eponymous magazine and hinted that the author was not entirely satisfied with Harper & Brothers. A few days later Dreiser found himself having dinner with Scott to discuss future books. Richards then convinced Dreiser to send to his editors at Harper a brazen letter intimating that other publishers had expressed interest in his books and demanding an advance of $4,000—$2,500 of it to be paid immediately—for both the just-published Jennie Gerhardt and for The Financier, which Dreiser had yet to finish and which Harper already had under contract. Not willing to lose an author whose books were getting attention in the press and whose sales were on the rise, his publisher agreed to the $2,500 portion—bringing the total to $3,500, more than enough to travel in style through Europe. He and Richards set sail on November 22, not even three weeks after their breakfast, and Dreiser didn’t return until April.

Disguised as “Barfleur” in Dreiser’s published accounts of his tour, Richards proved to be as adept a European tour guide as he was an impromptu literary agent. “I am quite sure that Barfleur, when he originally made his authoritative command that I come to England with him, was in no way satisfied that I would,” Dreiser wrote. “It was a somewhat light venture on his part, but here I was. And now, having ‘let himself in’ for this, as he would have phrased it, I could see that he was intensely interested in what Europe would do to me and possibly in what I would do to Europe.” More than even the narrator, Barfleur is the central figure of the travel articles Dreiser submitted to The Century Magazine. (When the manuscript arrived, the editors—and Richards—were appalled by the “women stuff,” and passages detailing the two men’s dalliances with various women, including prostitutes, had to be excised or drastically toned down.) The magazine pieces were incorporated into the book A Traveler at Forty, published in 1913 by Century in the U.S. and by Richards himself in England.

“Toward gambling, show, romance, a delicious scene, Barfleur carries a special mood.” And it is Barfleur who leads Dreiser through Paris, which (almost) lives up to the expectations the Englishman has conjured in the author’s mind. In the chapter of A Traveler at Forty titled “Paris!” Dreiser describes their arrival in the City of Light and their vivacious first night on the town—starting with the chic Café de Paris popular with American tourists, moving to the cabaret musical hall Folies-Bergère, and ending up for a midnight meal at the upscale restaurant Abbaye Thélème.

Notes: At the time of Dreiser’s visit, a restaurateur named M. Mouriez owned both the Café de Paris and the Abbaye Thélème. Over the previous half decade he had increased prices and improved service and décor with an eye to attracting American tourists, many of whom expected that fine dining should be expensive and anything that wasn’t must be déclassé. As The New York Times reported in August 1908, this business strategy upset both Mouriez’s competitors and local diners, who proposed a boycott of his establishments: “Parisians themselves are loudly complaining of the effect which the lavish expenditure of American dollars is having in raising the general standard of prices in the hotels and restaurants.”

George Moore was an Irish author who studied in Paris to be a painter and instead became a writer influenced by the naturalism of the French realists. Among his many books is the 1886 memoir Confessions of a Young Man, about life in bohemian Paris and London. The English-French phrase “on the qui vive” means “on the lookout.” Jean-Baptiste Greuze was an eighteenth-century French portrait painter.

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As we neared Paris he had built this city up so thoroughly in my mood that I am satisfied that I could not have seen it with a realistic eye if I had tried. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

The Village Feudists

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

Interesting Links

“Mencken and Dreiser: Friends, When Speaking” (Richard Lingeman, The New York Times)

Symposium/Video: “Sister Carrie in the 21st Century”: Joseph I. Epstein’s address begins at the nine-minute mark (CSPAN)

Previous selections from Dreiser’s Twelve Men
• “The Country Doctor”
• “A True Patriarch”
• “W. L. S.”

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

Palmer's Shipyard, Connecticut, c. 1910, oil on board by American artist Reynolds Beal (1867–1951). Noank shipbuilder Robert Palmer is featured in Dreiser’s story.

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Published in 1919, Theodore Dreiser’s Twelve Men includes a dozen portraits of people the author admired. Many of the sketches were written in the first years of the century, after Dreiser had left his job as a reporter and during a period in which he was depressed by the sales of his first novel, Sister Carrie. Literary scholar Ellen Moers, in her study of Dreiser’s major works, writes:

Apparently the most effective therapy Dreiser found was searching out people about the ideals that produced their contentment. It was a strange use to which to put the interviewing technique he had once practiced as a journalist; but it was the literary as well as psychological technique that produced Twelve Men. Each portrait was a stage in his own quest for purpose, for what he once called a “stern conclusion.”

Fictionalized to various degrees, the twelve sketches depict both good Samaritans and individualists—and a few men who can be seen as both. The first six feature acquaintances who Dreiser regarded as successful; the final six are failures in spite of their virtues.

Perhaps the earliest written of the final six is “The Village Feudists.” Originally titled “Heart Bowed Down,” it was based on a 1901 interview with Elihu Potter (Elihu Burridge in the story), a curmudgeonly shopkeeper in the fishing village of Noank, Connecticut. The narrator investigates the mystery of how such an admired and upstanding man alienated so many of his neighbors, especially the town’s leading citizen, the real-life shipyard owner Robert Palmer. Upon the book’s publication, one critic wrote that “the best of the lot as psychology is probably ‘The Village Feudists,’ a study of the warping into marked eccentricity of an essentially fine and generous character.”

Almost universally praised by the critics upon publication (and still considered one of Dreiser’s greatest works), Twelve Men sold fewer than 4,000 copies. But, in an unexpected way, the book did find happiness for its author. S. E. Woodward, senior vice-president of a financial company in New York, was a fan of Dreiser’s books and for a while added a postscript to his business letters: “If you have not read Twelve Men, get it and read it.” Intrigued, Woodward’s secretary, Helen Richardson, purchased a copy, loved the book, and mentioned to her boss that Dreiser was actually her grandmother’s nephew—although she had never met him. “Well,” Woodward responded, “why don’t you go around and see him? If he were my cousin, I certainly would.” So in September 1919, with no introduction or advance notice, she rang the door of the author’s studio at 165 West 10th Street in New York. Five years later, he wrote in an unpublished sketch that, irritated by the disturbance, he nearly didn’t answer—but, after they exchanged greetings, he welcomed her “as I would a beautiful light in a dungeon.” Helen later recalled in her memoir, “I felt as if I had been looking for Dreiser all my life.”

The couple eventually traveled together to Los Angeles, where Helen managed to get roles in movies, including a supporting role in Rudolph Valentino’s first film, The Four Horsemen in the Apocalypse. Dreiser’s attempt to sell movie scenarios in Hollywood came to naught, but while they lived in California he began work on An American Tragedy. Theodore and Helen remained together for the next quarter century and finally married in 1944, the year prior to Dreiser’s death.

Notes: On the first page of the selection is a reference to Parson Thirdly, a character who appears in Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd and his poem “Channel Firing.” The parson’s name is a mocking reference to the habit of dividing sermons into enumerated paragraphs. Decoration Day (page 1043) was observed after the American Civil War as a time to decorate the graves of dead soldiers; after World War II, it became more widely known as Memorial Day. Founded in 1866, G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic) was an organization of Union veterans of the Civil War; at its height, there were hundreds of posts across the country.

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In a certain Connecticut fishing-town sometime since, where, besides lobstering, a shipyard and some sail-boat-building there existed the several shops and stores which catered to the wants of those who labored in those lines, there dwelt a groceryman by the name of Elihu Burridge, whose life and methods strongly point the moral and social successes and failures of the rural man. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

A True Patriarch

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

Interesting Links
Theodore Dreiser, journalist (Ray E. Boombower, Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame)

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

Previous selections from Dreiser’s Twelve Men
• The Country Doctor
• W. L. S.

Buy the book
Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, Twelve Men
1,168 pages
List price: $40.00
Save 20%
Web store price: $32.00

“Mother . . . I’ve found such a poor family,” one of several illustrations by American artist William James Glackens (1870–1938) that accompanied “A True Patriarch” when it appeared in the December 1901 issue of McClure’s.

Theodore Dreiser’s memoir Newspaper Days relates his experiences as a journalist in four Midwestern cities during the 1890s and describes at length one particular assignment he initially dreaded. The St. Louis Republic, which hired him as a reporter in 1893, asked him to accompany to the Chicago World’s Fair twenty schoolteachers who had won a statewide popularity contest sponsored by the newspaper. His dread turned into delight when he met the group of women at the outset of their journey: “I was bewildered by the bouquet of faces around. Already the idea of the dreary school teacher had been dissipated. These were prizewinners.” He openly flirted with several of his fellow travelers, but much of his attention was reserved for Sara Osborne White, known as “Jug” to her friends.

The following July a smitten Dreiser visited Montgomery City, Missouri, to see Sara and meet her parents, and the couple maintained a tentative long-distance relationship for the next four years. Her father, Archibald White, whose family had lived in the area for seven decades, was a prominent local figure recognized for his support of Democratic causes and elected sheriff for a spell in the mid-1880s. Dreiser, perpetually ashamed by his own impoverished background and his family’s low social status, was awed by the Whites and was slow to commit to marriage until he felt more financially secure. Yet, in late 1898, while living in New York, he arranged to meet Sara in Washington, DC, for an elopement; they were married at the end of December.

Well into the early years of the twentieth century Dreiser was still struggling to make ends meet. His first novel, Sister Carrie, published in 1900, sold poorly and the response from reviewers was tepid at best. To support himself and his wife, Dreiser wrote stories and articles for magazines, and some of his work (in the words of literary critic Richard Lingeman), “fell between the editorial stools of fiction and article.” In one such piece, “A True Patriarch,” he created a semi-fictional account of his father-in-law, fleshing out anecdotes he had heard over the preceding decade. The editor of Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly rejected it because readers “would wonder in reading it where the ‘story’ was going to begin” and, besides, no one was interested in stories about Missourians.

“A True Patriarch” found a home in the December 1901 issue of McClure’s magazine—seven months before the subject of the profile died. Dreiser visited his in-laws for the Christmas holidays soon after it appeared, so it seems almost certain that Archibald White read it in the final months of his life, although we don’t know what the old patriarch himself may have thought of the account. In 1919 Dreiser updated and revised the story for inclusion in Twelve Men, adding elements that underscored White’s benevolent nature.

Note: The scriptural quote on page 987 is from the Epistle of James (1:27).

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In the streets of a certain moderate-sized county seat in Missouri not many years ago might have been seen a true patriarch. Tall, white-haired, stout in body and mind, he roamed among his neighbors, dispensing sympathy and a curiously genial human interest through the leisure of his day. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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The Country Doctor

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

Interesting Links
Capsule biography by Ray E. Boombower, commemorating Dreiser’s 2003 induction into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame

Previous Story of the Week selections by Theodore Dreiser:
• “W. L. S.” (also from Twelve Men)
• “A Certain Oil Refinery”

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Winter in the Ravine, c. 1912, by Indiana painter Theodore Clement Steele (1847-1926).

The indispensable Theodore Dreiser Encyclopedia tells us that in 1902 Dreiser began work on a story with the preliminary title of “A Samaritan of the Backwoods.” A friend of his wife had asked him to publish a profile of her father, who was a doctor, and Dreiser agreed. But, unable or unwilling to write about a man he didn’t know, he eventually shifted gears and wrote instead about Amos Wooley, the country doctor from his own teenage years in the mid-1880s, when Dreiser’s family lived in Warsaw, Indiana. The resulting profile of “Dr. Gridley,” then, is really a work of fiction: a composite panegyric that blends anecdotes from the lives of two rural doctors, both beloved for making home visits, practicing folk medicine, and dispensing soothing advice.

He fussed with the story for more than fifteen years, and it was finally published as “The Country Doctor” in Harper’s Magazine in 1918—but only after Dreiser turned down the magazine’s first two offers ($275 and $300, according to his diaries, which don’t reveal the final sum paid to the author). The following year he included the story in his collection Twelve Men, which gathered two decades’ worth of sketches of people he had admired.

Note: The last page of the selection includes four lines from “The Beacon”, a poem written by English banker Paul Moon James (1780–1854), often misattributed to the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852). Dreiser has changed the phrase “seraph of mercy” to read “angel of mercy.”

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How well I remember him—the tall, grave, slightly bent figure, the head like Plato's or that of Diogenes, the mild, kindly, brown-gray eyes peering, all too kindly, into the faces of dishonest men. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

W. L. S.

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

Interesting Links
Information about William L. Sonntag Jr.” (Mary Ran Gallery)

In “W.L.S.” Dreiser mentions two paintings by Sonntag: The Bowery at Night (pictured at right) and Madison Square Garden (Museum of the City of New York)

Previous Story of the Week selection
“A Certain Oil Refinery,” Theodore Dreiser

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Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, Twelve Men
1,168 pages
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Theodore Dreiser: An American Tragedy
960 pages
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Bowery at Night, c. 1895, watercolor by William Louis Sonntag Jr. From the collections of the Museum of the City of New York.

A biographical profile by Thomas P. Riggio reminds us that, although Theodore Dreiser is “remembered primarily for his novels, he wrote in many genres. In fact, of his twenty-seven published books only eight are novels—and two of these, The Bulwark and The Stoic, were published posthumously.” He also wrote journalism, short stories, poetry, plays, travel books, memoirs, essays, and social criticism. In the 1919 collection Twelve Men he gathered two decades’ worth of sketches of friends and acquaintances he had admired. Among the dozen was William Louis Sonntag Jr., the W. L. S. of this week’s selection.

Sonntag is not well known today, and those who do recognize the name regard him as an initially promising watercolorist associated with the painters who later formed the Ashcan School, known for their gritty, realist depictions of New York street life. His father, William Louis Sonntag Sr. (1822–1900), was a moderately famous landscape painter of the Hudson River School. Dreiser first met the younger Sonntag when he hired him as a magazine illustrator, but he found so much more to admire in his new friend, who awed him with an astonishing range of interests and activities, a number of which are described in “W. L. S.”

Dreiser originally published his profile of Sonntag as “The Color of To-Day” in Harper’s in 1901. Fourteen years later, he would further immortalize Sonntag in the character Eugene Witla, the painter-hero of the novel The “Genius”—a portrayal also inspired by another Ashcan painter, Everett Shinn, and by Dreiser himself. The novel was almost immediately banned by The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and condemned in the press for its frank sexual themes (“A Riot of Eroticism” and “Mr. Dreiser Chooses a Tom-Cat for a Hero” were typical review titles). After a lengthy court battle, the book was finally re-issued in 1923.

Notes: The New York Central No. 999 (p. 1121) is alleged to have been the first locomotive to exceed 100 mph in speed. The Baldwin Company (p. 1121) is shorthand for Baldwin Locomotive Works, a Pennsylvania-based company founded in 1825. The Hoffman House (p. 1129) was a grand hotel located near Madison Square in Manhattan.

Life’s little ironies are not always manifest. We hear distant rumbling sounds of its tragedies, but rarely are we permitted to witness the reality. Therefore the real incidents which I am about to relate may have some value. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

A Certain Oil Refinery

Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945)
From American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

Interesting Links
Short video: Thomas Edison's film of the destruction by fire of Standard Oil Company's plant at Bayonne, N.J., on July 5th, 1900 (Library of Congress)

The Dreiser Web Source (University of Pennsylvania Libraries)

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American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
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1047 pages • 80 pages of photographs, many in full color

Bayonne, New Jersey, refinery complex in 1890. Engraving from King's Hand-book of the United States.

In the anthology Writing New York, Phillip Lopate observes:

When Indiana-born Theodore Dreiser arrived in New York in 1894, he found “the city of my dreams” and explored it avidly, fascinated by its sharp contrasts. In his first masterpiece, Sister Carrie (1900), and his later Frank Cowperwood trilogy, he portrayed New York as a Social Darwinist winnowing machine, elevating some to the top while pushing others under.

In addition to his more famous works of fiction, Dreiser wrote a series of newspaper sketches about his adopted home, and he collected some of them in The Color of a Great City. One of the pieces, first published in 1919, takes his readers on a tour of the Standard Oil works, located in Bayonne, New Jersey, which on a clear day could be seen across New York Bay from the south side of Brooklyn. Dreiser’s Social Darwinism is on full display here, contrasting the mansions of Fifth Avenue with the “wretched” conditions of the industrial purgatory populated by men “of an order which you would call commonplace.” His article says little of the work itself (“You can find the how of it in any encyclopedia”) and instead focuses on the toxic filth and foul odor of the Bayonne refinery—reminding us that the societal and environmental costs of America’s hunger for oil are a century old.

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There is a section of land very near New York, lying at the extreme southern point of the peninsula known as Bayonne, which is given up to a peculiar business. . . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.