Political Writings

Preface

PREFACE Theodore Dreiser’s considerable fame as a novelist has overshadowed much of his other writing. Of the twenty-seven books he published during his lifetime, only eight were novels—and two of these, one unfinished at his death, were issued posthumously. Although much of Dreiser’s fiction and autobiographical writing can be mined for its political significance, his lifelong insistence on a strict division between creative writing and “propaganda” makes the task difficult. He self-mockingly told a friend that when the last volume of his fictional portrait of a financier was published, “most of my critics will pounce on it as decidedly unsocial and even ridiculous as coming from a man who wants social equity” (Dreiser to Dorothy Dudley, 7 April 1932). Dreiser anticipated his critics and biographers in recognizing the paradoxes that riddled his career. By temperament a bundle of contradictions, Dreiser was especially hard to pin down when it came to his political opinions and loyalties. He could secretly edit the freewheeling Bohemian magazine while serving as editor-in-chief of the cautious, patently bourgeois Delineator; he would write for the Masses one week and the Saturday Evening Post the next; he was a working associate of the leftwing Trotskyite Max Eastman, but was as content hobnobbing with writers as different as the Tory H. L. Mencken and the apolitical bohemian George Sterling. Into his fifties, Dreiser consistently paraphrased Chekhov and declared that “it was not so much the business of the writer to indict as to interpret.” The social implications of this artistic credo are seen in this edition, which isolates a cross-section of his overtly political thought. During the first half of his career Dreiser assumed the role of an interpreter of the spectacle of life, a stance that in both his political writing and fiction allowed him to admire amoral capitalists like his financier Cowperwood and, simultaneously , to express pity and the need of reform for the impoverished masses. They were all, in this view, part of the “color” of life, each depending on the other’s presence for existence and providing a kind of “balance” inherent in the natural order of things. The personal attacks he endured during World War I, as both a German American and a pacifist, intensified his liberal proclivities; but his protest remained within the limits of generally accepted progressive politics. Dreiser’s position changed dramatically during the second half of his career, in the years after the stock market crash of 1929. He moved from xii • Preface irresolute political involvement to an openly activist stance, identifying with the aims of various leftist political movements. Like others in the 1930s he idealistically looked to the Soviet experiment as a model for a new democratic order, particularly after the rise of fascism abroad. He abandoned the precarious social balance he had once maintained, rejected what he now called the “myth of individuality,” and vociferously advocated support for the “people” as a means of bettering society here and abroad. Dreiser certainly was not alone in his revision of long-held beliefs. He was one among other mainstream writers—such as Sherwood Anderson, Edmund Wilson, and John Dos Passos—who helped to make radical politics respectable among intellectuals in the 1930s. Like Dreiser they embraced socialist and communist enterprises, often with a great deal of ambivalence, and at times with an underlying nostalgia for an older social order. Their hesitancies were perhaps most intense when they confronted the tensions between their aesthetic and political allegiances. Dreiser’s ambivalences are on full display in this edition, the first to present the complete range of his political thought. The neglect of this aspect of his writing had little to do with lack of significant material. Although not formally a political theorist, Dreiser wrote as a citizen who spent his creative energies observing the American scene. He was prolific in this field and influential in his day. He published three books on political subjects—Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928), Tragic America (1931), and America Is Worth Saving (1941). Add to these a mound of journalism, broadsides, contributions to books, speeches, and introductions, and one could assemble a multivolume set of his political commentary. Two factors led to a lack of interest in this work. First, his leftist politics was, to greatly understate the matter, out of favor during the long Cold War decades. Second, there is the matter of his methodology. It is still fashionable to routinely dismiss a book like Tragic America...