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s n l jp Introduction I have been writing for over fifty years about the generation of American writers who came to maturity in the 1890s and who are usually designated as naturalists. I have always been aware of the anti-Semitism present in the thinking of almost all of these writers, but since I believed that this was not a major element in their work, I put it aside. More recently, however, while editing Dreiser’s interviews and then his letters, I came to realize that this strain had a more significant role in his career than I had previously understood . From my effort in a lengthy essay to explain and describe Dreiser’s anti-Semitism I have moved on to an attempt in this volume to deal with the phenomenon in five of the major writers of the period. What is intriguing in any consideration of the anti-Semitism of these writers is the contradiction between the regressive nature of this belief, with its underlying atavistic hate and fear of the stranger/outsider, and the more enlightened character of their values, writings, and activities in many other areas. These concerns range in nature and intensity from Dreiser’s lifelong commitment to causes on behalf of the poor and oppressed, Garland’s devotion to a wide range of social improvement activities for most of his career, Cather’s and Wharton’s espousal in their writing of feminist positions, and Norris’s attack on corporate greed. Yet even though all these writers, especially Dreiser, Norris, and Garland, were in their own day frequently considered radical in their beliefs, they also expressed anti-Semitic ideas. Indeed, they often did so without any conscious awareness of a discrepancy between these viewpoints and their other values. In 1920, for example, Garland was asked to sign a letter protesting the rise of anti-Semitism in America. In the course of i-xviii_1-90_Pize.indd 9 4/10/08 11:37:48 AM s n l jp x . american naturalism and the jews his reply refusing the request, Garland noted that he was a “reformer” who for forty years had been “an advocate for social betterment” in America. Nevertheless , he said elsewhere in the letter, it was necessary to “frankly admit the presence of an Internationalist Jew and to deplore the disturbing and embittering effect of his presence in America.”1 (The “Internationalist Jew,” it should be explained, was Henry Ford’s term, derived from his acceptance of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion forgery, for Jews engaged in a conspiracy to control the finances and culture of all nations.)2 The question I seek to answer in this volume is that of how and why this contradiction occurred. The contradiction is, I believe, a distinctively American issue. Interpreters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century anti-Semitism as a worldwide phenomenon have often noted that anti-Semitism in America was principally rhetorical in nature while the European variety was activist.3 Americans expressed anti-Semitic beliefs but, unlike European anti-Semites, they did not seek to translate these beliefs into riots or pogroms or oppressive law. It has not been noted, however, that, unlike the United States, most European anti-Semitism stemmed from writers and thinkers who were also conservative or reactionary in their other social beliefs. I wish to examine the sources and nature of anti-Semitism in this group of late nineteenth-century American writers to help explain how it was possible for them to find antiSemitism palatable as a belief in the face of their strongly held liberal values concerning other areas of American social life. The subtitle of this volume contains the names of the five authors I consider in the book in order to make clear that, despite the work’s title, I do not intend the study to be inclusive for American literary naturalism as a whole. My interest rather is in a select group of writers born in the 1860s and ’70s who came to maturity in the 1890s, who then constituted the major new force in American expression for several decades, and who expressed antiSemitic beliefs.4 The “naturalism” of these writers is not my focus; indeed, Garland and Cather are only seldom considered naturalists. But since all of the authors I discuss are of this generation and share in the naturalist desire to produce a more truthful American literature, I have adopted the term for the group as a whole. Of the significant writers of...

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