The daily worker., 1931-08-28

strong, too real; when the critics who had res
ceived advance copies denounced it as irnnora&
the publishers refused to release it for eircula.
ton. The trouble was that Dresser was about
fifteen years ahead of his time.
Not until eleven years later did Dresser yens
ture to publish another novel. But the vice.
crusaders, the pure minded defenders OF bour-
geois morals and profits, were on his trail again
and in 1915 they got him: they suppressed "The
Genius" Dresser had by this time achieved a
great popular reputation but he still had to
fight his way to official recognition. The crit
les were of two kinds the smuthounds who de-
nounced him as a pervert who ought to be
burned at the stake, and the esthetes who held
their noses at his terrible style"-they couldn't
see the forest for the trees So they once did
before the phenomenon of Whitman And like
Whitman, Dresser, for all his shortcomings has
created hugey-a vivid, sprawling world, chunks
out of late nineteenth and twentieth century
America Sprung from the masses, he has de.
spite his confusic~s, always been psychologically
close to the mas. That is why the thirty
year-old SISTER Carrie" is more alive today than
last years best seller, and why you can walk
into almost any branch of the New York public
library and have the time of your life Gas did)
trying to find one of his novels-they're all out.
Now Dresser has gone further. He has taken
the step that he couldn't take after his visit to
the Soviet Union in 1927 because in the u. S.
S. r. he observed everything except the driving
force of it all: the overthrow of capitalism and
the establishment Of the proletarian DICTATOR
ship But the economic crisis has made even
blind men see-and the Dreisers and Roman
Hollands were never blind men, They grope,
they stumble and fall, it is hard for them at this
late date to break with the past to say that alh
they believed in was lie; but they rise again.
driven by the vision of bankrupt capitalism
and vigorous, challenging Soviet Russia, CROP
ing towards the only path out of the capitalist
nel-house the path of the revolutionary
struggle for freedom of the toiling masses the
world over 1t is a bad omen for capitalism
when its best minds, its finest spirits begin to
desert it. They are deserting lost battlefield.
What will be Dreisers future developmentf
No one can say. His contribution to the recent
symposium, Living PHILOSOPHERS shows him
still bound by his old confusons The contra
diction between this philosophy of nihiism and
mystical fataism and his recent activities in
behalf of the working class is SO sharp that it
is hardly possible that Dresser is unaware of it:
| it is a contradiction that may lead him astray.
| 1t can only be resolved if Dresser dumps over.
| board all that pseudo-scientific philosophical
| baggage and replaces it with the only phil.
osophy that not only explains the world but
shows how it can and must be changed-dialec-
Clcal IlaCerlallSH tIlaC HaUerlallSm evolved py
| Marx Engels and Lenin which forms the ideologs
| ical foundation for the struggles OF the op-'
pressed masses throughout the world.
| The revolutionary American workers welcome
| the new Theodore Dresser and hope he will gui
| further They recognize in him friend, .
| courageous champion. He has lost few bour-
| geois sycophants, and won thousands of friends
| from the ranks of those who are the heirs OF
| the great cultural achievements of the past and
the builders of the culture of the future. On
his sixtieth birthday we greet Theodore Dresser:
we greet the youthful vigor and warmth Of spirit
| that today makes him more keenly aware OF the
| realities of the life about him than he was
| thirty years ago. Men like Dresser and ROLAND
| are figures who cast the shadows OF history.
| They have become something greater than
| great writer's; they are among the fishters fo5l
! the new world. 4
u