Dreiser's Anti-Corporate Tools: Veil-Piercing and the Novel of Corporate Agency

1. A Vast Lever and a Tool's Tool

Try as you might to be a corporate agitator, you will become a corporate shill. Theodore Dreiser delivers this grim message in "The Toil of the Laborer" (1913), a journalistic depiction of his predicament working for a "great corporation . . . a vast lever," otherwise known as the New York Central Railroad ("Toil" 20). Employed as a manual laborer, Dreiser observes how the wealthy corporation relies on "unjust exaction" from its workers, a dynamic he vows to combat if opportunity knocks (22). Yet, when promoted from laborer to foreman, Dreiser breaks his moral promise, working his men just as hard as his foreman worked him. The reason is not ignorance, denial, or befuddling of his ethical compass; he still sees that "in so far as the corporation was concerned," the laborers were "mere machines" for exploitation. Nor is the problem his will or intention, since he tries "to adjust [his] new relationship to the ideal which [he] had held before [him]self," while complying with the company's rules. Instead, Dreiser struggles with how to avoid performing the role of replaceable corporate cog: "If [he] did not fulfill the company's orders, someone else would" (23), just as Sister Carrie's (1900) desperate George Hurstwood becomes a trolley-driving scab (424). Foreman Dreiser cannot discover a way to act on the company that was not also to act for the company's "unjust exaction." Discouraged, he quits, choosing "not to be a tool in the hands of those who were tools themselves . . . even though by quitting I could not relieve the situation of its pain" ("Toil" 25).

Dreiser's dilemma is not how generally to impose his will on a world where culture and nature blur together, efflorescing agency and personhood everywhere; it is, instead, how to act specifically on a collective business entity, one that appears to have a personality and will of its own. Of course, thinking about Dreiser in terms of structure and agency is not exactly new: US literary naturalism was long understood to explore the possibilities of human action within a deterministic framework. Whereas the futility of agency in such a scenario led Malcolm Cowley to label naturalism "pessimistic determinism" (225) and Lionel Trilling to condemn it as "showy nihilism" (18), later critics reframed naturalist accounts into "melodramas of uncertain agency" (Seltzer 21) or a "transcendent agency" that "supersedes liberalism" (H. Horwitz 12).¹ But texts such as "Toil" pose a different problem entirely: How can Dreiser make his actions meaningful on a corporate actor—specifically, on the "vast lever" of the "great corporation"—to end systemic exploitation? Rather than a sweeping quandary about the fate of action if roles such as "laborer" or "man" are predetermined, what is at stake for Dreiser is how to act practically in and on one's narrowed spot of the corporate machine—and how to represent such action in the novel—once corporations have altered the possibility of what agency means.

Like Norris, his early champion, Dreiser saw the rapid rise in corporate entities at the end of the nineteenth century altering not only the calculus for human agency but also the institutional context in which we act. Something about will and responsibility changes when people pool their capital to create a corporation or trust (forms that he, like legal theorists and muckrakers of the period, portrayed as conceptually similar to each other but of a different order of magnitude):

[Businessmen] are well aware that while they [individually] have souls, this huge combination has none, and must always bide by a majority decision of its component individuals, however wrong the decision. They know that it lives and lives. . . . Fully aware are they that they cannot endow so huge a corporation with pity. They only know that they can create it, that it can aid them to crush opposition, and that it can make return opulently, and with so much are they content.

("[Trust]" 112)

When the immortal corporation (that "lives and lives") rises up, a new type of moral hazard appears. An...