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chapter 6 Mencken, Monkeys, and Modernity: A New Metaphysic for the Newsroom When the young Theodore Dreiser, ambitious, impressionable, and at the beginning of a lifelong rebellion against conventional religion, went to work as a reporter for the Chicago Daily Globe in 1892, he discovered among his professional cohorts an exciting new guiding philosophy—a metaphysic for the newsroom that probably exists in as many of today’s big-city newsrooms as it did in Dreiser’s time. Among the cynical and irreverent journalists of the Globe—“hard,gallant adventurers,” as Dreiser described them—Dreiser said he was “finally liberated” from the “moralistic and religionistic qualms” that he had inherited from a rigid and orthodox German Catholic father, who had dragged his family through a succession of small Indiana towns eking out a living as a woolen mill worker and laborer. His coworkers, Dreiser wrote in his memoirs,were free from the notions of conventional thinking,suspicious of the motives of all people, and confused by the passive American acceptance of the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes. His colleagues “did not believe, as I still did, that there was a fixed moral order in the world which one contravened at his peril,” Dreiser said.“Most of these young men looked upon life as a fierce, grim struggle in which no quarter was either given or taken, and in which all men laid traps,lied,squandered,erred through illusion: a conclusion with which I now most heartily agree.”1 Dreiser’s easy adoption of what he called the “pagan or unmoral” outlook of the newsroom came to infuse the fiction that led him to be called the great American practitioner of “naturalism,” a literary genre known for its gritty realism , its grim fatalism, and its tragic characters whose lives were shaped by internal and external forces largely beyond their control. The naturalists were particularly influenced by the theories of Charles Darwin and adapted his bio06 .88-101/Unde 1/15/02, 9:41 AM 88 Mencken, Monkeys, and Modernity 89 logical teachings into a social philosophy that put the imperative of personal survival above other moral considerations. Dreiser’s philosophy, as reflected in Sister Carrie, his first novel about a wayward young woman who rose to success in the big city, was considered scandalous by many of his contemporaries but, in its indifference toward Victorian social mores, is now viewed as a pioneering work that ushered in modern attitudes toward sex and morality.2 Like many journalists both before and after him, Dreiser was not particularly well read in philosophy or theology. But he knew enough to be deeply impressed by the writings of Herbert Spencer, whose theory of social Darwinism held out the notion of “survival of the fittest” as justification for the inequities in the social and economic order, and Julian Huxley, the scientist brother of Aldous Huxley and one of Darwin’s strongest public advocates. Although his understanding was incomplete, Dreiser felt the “lingering filaments” of his Catholicism severed as he read Huxley, who treated Christian dogma as superstition , and Spencer, whose philosophy of evolution portrayed every person as insignificantly and helplessly adrift in a universe of Darwinian forces. “[Spencer ] nearly killed me,” Dreiser wrote, “took every shred of belief away from me; showed me that I was a chemical atom in a whirl of unknown forces.”3 For Dreiser, like many of his generation, this virtual “warfare” between science and theology was a defining issue, profoundly unsettling him and making orthodox Christian belief virtually impossible. It was during this era that modern journalism took many of its attitudes, and many journalists, like Dreiser, began to drift in secular directions. This did not happen without wrenching social and psychological changes that saw not only the rise of science and the triumph of the Industrial Revolution in the United States but also a religious struggle that sometimes took place within individuals deeply pained at the loss of the old religious certainties. Dreiser’s era can be seen as a watershed period that climaxed three hundred years of conflict in America between orthodox Christians and Enlightenment skeptics. The repeated revival movements and upsurges of Christian enthusiasm were in part a response to the steady growth of a population alienated from Christian life and contributed to the schisms, divisions, and sectarian rivalries within the Christian community itself. Ironically , as these religious currents pulled along news organizations in their wake, journalists—increasingly scornful of...

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