The daily worker., 1931-08-28
Theodore Dresser: The Old and
thn Nnyu
the New


of 'art?" Dresser has committed the unpardon-
able sin; at an age when he should know better
he has attacked the foundations of capitalist
society he has aligned himself with dangerous
outlaw elenents-"Reds," Communists; he has
raised his voice for the working class and
against the capitalist class. And suddenly: his
bCchs are awful, he never could write, he's only
ham, etc The literary birds of prey (nost of
whom were only yesterday singing his praises
are bu5ily pecking away.
Theodore Dresser was born on August a. 1871,
In Terre Haute Ind in that Middle West which
he saw grow with the growth of American cap
italism to be the granary and the great indus
trial heart of the country. It was the golden
age of American capitalism when the empire
was sweeping westward. scattering new cities
factories railways, minesy oil wes-new pulsat-
ing life over a vast virgin territory. This was
the era 81 the foundation of the great fortunes
Morgan. Rockefeller, Could Hartman Car
negie- hen competitive capitalism was giving
place t. the monopolistic iuggernauts dominated
by finance capital, the prelude to the ruthless
imperalist expansion of the twentieth century
On the other side was the rising labor move
ment, the workers who were creating all this
bounded driven to fierce resistance. The great
railway strike of 1877 the Molly Maguires. the
struggle for the eight-hour day that resulted in
the Haymarket case, the coal strikes, the Home
stead and Pullman strikes of the nineties-ths
was the other side of the picture of the golden
age. The path of empire was path of blood.
Drelsers early years were spent amid poverty
and hardShipS, his emotional and mental life
warped by the religious fanaticsm of Catholic
father. Lacking contact with the struggles of
the workers as a class, life became for him
merely hard individual struggle for existence
He became filled, he himself describes it. with
"a blazing and unchecked desire to get on" and
fell prey to the popular illusions that the ruling
class so carefully fosters. His senses revelled in
the power and glitter of the new industrial life;
it held out promises of material reward that
filled his heart, nurtured on poverty and mean
ness, with a restless longing Throughout his
writing this conflict between lonely poverty and
the desire for wealth and the SOCIAL privileges
that wealth brings is dominant note, the we'll
spring OF much of the pathos and tragedy in his
work 1t is so in his first novel, Sister Carrie"
and in his last, IAN American Tragedy"
,a But Dresser didn't become go-getter; moody
groopng, sensitive, he soon realized the shallow
ness of mere material gain and instead of be-
coming the successful newspaperman that he
might have been, he turned to creative writing
In his brooding, blundering way, Dresser was
sensing that beneath all this glittering fanfare
3 this speed and power, lay great core of human
s suffering poverty and desolation. He failed to
Z see the revolutionary workers and the class
struggle, but he saw thousands OF individuals
members of the working and middle classes
tossing on the tides Of industrial life rebelling
falling victim to the temptations of bourgeois
society being crushed. And he saw, too the
brutality and unscrupulousness OF those in
the nineteenth century bourgeois materialists
Darwing, Huxley, Tr-rdall and Spencer, seemed
to confirm the view that life was blind brutal
struggle for existence in which the strong con-
quer the weak. But Dresers materialism has
always been full Of inconsistencies and strongly
tinged with mysticism. His attitude toward life
has been nihilistic; at the same time he has
been intensely concerned about the fate of in
diviiuals. Declaring that the strong inevitably
&C uer the weak, admiring the strength of the
strong, there is, nevertheless throughout his
work an implicit protest against the barbarites
of capitalism. Here we have the typical vacilla-
tions and confusions of the middle class.
In 1900 Dreiser's first novel, "Sister Carrie"
was published. 1t marked the beginning of a
new epoch in American literature, the rise OF
new realism. This realism broke completely
with the tradition OF sedate pictures OF middle
class life such as filtered through the novels Of
William Dean Howells. "sister Carrie" was too