Political Writings (review)

Political Writings is the latest volume in the Dreiser Edition, whose goal in numerous volumes since the 1981 Sister Carrie, based on the original manuscript, has been to make accessible works not previously published or not readily available. Jude Davies has selected, in whole or in part, 55 works demonstrating the development of Dreiser’s political ideas from 1895 to 1945. The selections constitute less than a third of the more than 200 books, articles, essays, broadsides, speeches, plays, and poems that Dreiser wrote on political subjects, but specialists will not likely feel any significant lack in the coverage, and those encountering Dreiser’s political ideas for the first time will find the collection indispensable.

With the “partial exception” of letters Dreiser wrote in 1933 to Hutchins Hapgood to deny Hapgood’s charge of anti-Semitism, all texts in Political Writings were either published during Dreiser’s lifetime or written for publication and therefore have been edited as “public documents.” That is, Davies has corrected typos and factual errors and has “silently standardized” punctuation and spelling to conform to today’s usage or to regularize Dreiser’s inconsistencies. (In my view, standardization comes with a cost, minor to be sure, when the flavor of Dreiser’s original wording is lost, for example in replacing “sweater-shop” with “sweatshop” and “moralic” with “moralistic”). Previously unpublished items have been edited from manuscripts or typescripts at the Dreiser Collection at the University of Pennsylvania; previously published items have been edited anew when the latest typescripts are available. Differences in substance between published versions of a text or between the published version and the latest type-script have been reconciled in light of “Dreiser’s intentions with reference to his general objectives at the time of composition.” Those who frown on eclectic editions might object to some of Davies’s choices, but the textual notes and headnotes provide the publication history for texts published more than once and explain the choice of copy text. A full list of emendations has been placed on file at Penn. Besides the headnote, textual note, and historical notes for most items, the apparatus includes a preface by Thomas P. Riggio, General Editor of the Dreiser Edition, an introduction by Davies describing the development of Dreiser’s political ideas, and a Historical Commentary by Davies for each of the four stages of that development: 1895–1910, 1911–1928, 1929–1937, and 1938–1945.

Riggio’s Preface describes a Dreiser familiar to students of his fiction, “a bundle of contradictions” who is “essentially hard to pin down.” Riggio sees Dreiser’s political ideas as falling roughly into two phases. Up until the stock market crash of 1929, Dreiser saw himself as “an interpreter of the spectacle of life” who could admire “amoral capitalists” like Frank Cowperwood while calling for reforms “within the limits of generally accepted progressive politics.” After 1929, he adopted “an openly activist stance” that involved him directly in leftist causes and led to his joining the Communist Party in 1945. The reason for the neglect of Dreiser’s political thought since the end of World War II, Riggio contends, is Americans’ antipathy towards the left during the Cold War and the widespread belief that his polemics were poorly written and filled with inaccuracies.

In his Introduction, Davies links Dreiser’s political writing to his fiction in that both are concerned “with human dignity and self-fulfillment, and the obstacles to both.” But while Dreiser’s novels and other literary works found their “essential subject” in “the American scene,” his political work found it in “America-in-the-world,” with “American exceptionalism” being the primary target of his attacks. Following a survey of Dreiser’s political interests from 1895 on, Davies returns to the “important parallels” between the political writing and the fiction, maintaining that at times “throughout his career, Dreiser took up in the political sphere issues depicted in his fiction.” His efforts to prevent the judicial lynching of the...