Chicago and “the East”: Dreiser, Adams, Mark Twain
Sometimes I see myself as a hoop in an arc reaching over from one phase of existence to another.
THEODORE DREISER
One day in 1889, eighteen-year-old Caroline Meeber from Columbia City, Wisconsin—“Sister Carrie as she was half affectionately termed by her family”—boarded a train for Chicago that was to take her (and the surprisingly but never dependably gifted newspaper reporter from Terre Haute who had imagined her for his first novel) into world literature. The twenty-eight-year-old Theodore Dreiser, who had been raised in an immigrant German Catholic home and was largely self-educated, having hungrily absorbed in public libraries harsh doctrine from Balzac and Herbert Spencer, was never to forget his first glimpse of Chicago in the 1880s. To the boy just off the Indiana train, the raw and muddy city was an “Aladdin’s view” from The Arabian Nights. “Had I one gift to offer the world, it would be the delight of sensing the world as I then saw it.” The Aladdin’s lamp became the “giant magnet” in Sister Carrie. Chicago’s population on the eve of the 1890s was
not so much thriving upon established commerce as upon the industries which prepared for the arrival of others. The sound of the hammer engaged upon the erection of new structures was everywhere heard. Great industries were moving in. The huge railroad corporations which had long before recognized the prospects of the place had seized upon vast tracts of land for transfer and shipping purposes. Streetcar lines had been extended far out into the open country in anticipation of rapid growth. The city had laid miles and miles of streets and sewers through regions where, perhaps, one solitary house stood out alone—a pioneer of the populous ways to be. There were regions open to the sweeping winds and rain, which were yet lighted throughout the night with long, blinking lines of gas-lamps, fluttering in the wind. Narrow board walks extended out, passing here a house, and there a store, at far intervals, eventually ending on the open prairie.
Carrie was eighteen in 1889 because Dreiser, born in the year of the Great Fire, was then eighteen. The Chicago that Carrie first saw was the Chicago rebuilt as steel after the 1871 fire had almost completely wiped out the old wooden ramshackle Chicago. Still clinging to the lake, and backed up by the empty prairie, the city with its eye on the future was by 1893 to transcend itself. Suddenly a center and showplace of American “energies,” as Henry Adams was surprised to note, it grabbed for itself the World’s Columbian Exposition in honor of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s unintended discovery.
No one who was there ever forgot what was to become the most celebrated fair and exposition in American history. It marked the symbolic end of their rustic and small-town world for many Middle Western Americans. It saw the greatest outpouring of crowds since the Civil War, proudly exhibited American industrial processes and the latest technology at a time when the United States was eclipsing Great Britain, and inspired a brash new style in mass entertainment, the era of Coney Island amusement parks. Whitman, who had died the year before, would have gloried in what he called democratic “ensemble”—the urban mass he called the counterpart of Leaves of Grass.
“Theo” Dreiser had special reason to remember the fair. He met his future wife, Sara Osborne White (familiarly known as Jug), in the summer of 1893 when the twenty-one-year-old star reporter on the St. Louis Republic “shepherded” to the fair a group of Missouri schoolteachers who had won a contest sponsored by the newspaper. Dreiser, with just one year at the University of Indiana paid for by a high school teacher, was self-conscious about his lack of a degree and of middle-class refinement. German had been spoken in Dreiser’s home, even by his native-born Mennonite mother, in deference to his immigrant father. The fact that Jug the schoolteacher had a firmer hold on grammar than Dreiser did had helped to make her desirable. In the course of a madly erotic life he often managed to combine a love affair with editorial help. At his urging after their marriage, Jug went through the manuscript of Sister Carrie and made many genteel revisions. Dreiser was anxious to tone down the sexual matter that was central to the book, in the belief that this would make the book more acceptable to a publisher. It did not. Dreiser never suffered long from objections to his style; he unconsciously relied on narrative force to carry him through. The firmness of Jug’s character, once a welcome contrast to his “dissolute” sisters (models for Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt), was eventually to prove too much for the moody Dreiser, who could never remain interested for very long in any one woman—and who liked from time to time to torment himself about this failing.
Chicago in the nineties, the most disturbed period in American life after the Civil War, was Dreiser’s destined subject, as it was for other Midwestern writers. He did not choose it, as Henry James chose so many things to write about. Chicago seemed to choose him—which was what Dreiser felt about every circumstance in his life, every plot in his fiction. He was the first American novelist to invest the big city with such a hungry, avid sense of power. No one after him has yet rendered the physical discovery of a city in such haunting detail, with so much feeling brought up from the depths of the old small-town experience. As a foreigner of sorts, the first major American writer who was not a Protestant, and a “barbarian” by accepted standards, he could not help challenging the pieties of a society unable to anticipate their loss.
Dreiser’s images of the city have a lasting hold because he described the most familiar objects in a great city as if they were foreign to him. The pathos of distance became his fictional perspective, the medium in which his most affecting characters move. Every appearance of the modern city became single, hallucinatory, painfully distinct with that first impression of a new world. Carrie comes to Chicago to live with her sister, finds herself unwelcome, and walks about, looking for work. The frightened but impressionable eighteen-year-old girl from Columbia City matched the newness of Chicago. Dreiser identified the stupor and loneliness in Carrie’s heart with the unfinished landscape and the brutal unconcern surrounding it. The force with which Chicago had been built up from the prairie fascinated its own intellectuals. In With the Procession, a satire by Chicago’s “patrician” Henry Blake Fuller, a character pointing to the “new” Chicago says that the town
labors under one disadvantage: it is the only great city in the world to which all its citizens have come for the one common, avowed object of making money. There you have its genesis, its growth, its end and object.… In this Garden City of ours every man cultivates his own little bed and his neighbor his; but who looks after the paths between?
Chicago was halfway between the wilderness and the stock exchange. Every human aggression was closer to the writer’s eye. Chicago was a concentrated force accessible enough to become a favorite subject of social criticism on the part of early realists like Fuller and Robert Herrick, transplanted Harvard poets and scholars at the new University of Chicago like William Vaughn Moody and Robert Morss Lovett, tough-talking “literary” reporters from Carl Sandburg to Ben Hecht. Much of Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), with key terms for the appetites of the new-rich like “conspicuous consumption,” was documented from Chicago. The new science of sociology, often based on the immigrants’ settling into their separate ethnic wards, found brilliant exponents at the university founded on Rockefeller money. The sardonic criticism of American wealth and its manners that was to fill early-twentieth-century fiction also found its grim material in the Haymarket affair, the stockyards, the meat-processing jungle, the terrible winters and sometimes even more terrible police. Nowhere but in Chicago would a millionaire (Levi Leiter) have offered to buy the Great Wall of China.
The obvious thing about Chicago was that it was forever making itself, as it was remaking the Polish and Slavic immigrants and the children of farms and small towns who streamed into it. As a subject, it was easier to get hold of than New York, was present all compact to a writer’s eye; the transformation from the old provincial life to the magnificent views from Lake Shore Drive was the work of one short, violent period in history. Chicago incarnated the big change that so many young people were making in their lives. And Dreiser, in the literalness of his fascination with the city, the obsession with fact that he developed as a skilled reporter and effective writer of “tragedy and heartbreak” stories for the Sunday supplements, identified totally with the “lure” of the city.
In the original version of Sister Carrie Dreiser reproduced the names of Chicago saloons, restaurants, business establishments. He carefully listed “Chicago windows” as the “large plates of window glass … then rapidly coming into use.” He did not have to invent anything that Carrie saw when she first made the rounds of Chicago looking for work, or the “gorgeous” and “truly swell” saloon where Hurstwood was manager. Not the overhead curved marble oscillating fans above the bar, the ceramic tile floor, and the top-hatted ward heelers, actors, merchants, politicians, “the general run of successful characters about town, a goodly company of rotund, rosy figures, silk-hatted, starchy-bosomed, be-ringed and be-scarf pinned to the queen’s taste.” Not Hurstwood himself, who enters Sister Carrie “dressed in excellent, tailored suits of imported goods, several rings upon his fingers, a fine blue diamond in his necktie, a striking vest of some new pattern and a watch chain of solid gold which held a charm of rich design and a watch of the latest make and engraving.”
The twenty-eight-year-old Dreiser began his first novel in the fall of 1899 by suddenly writing on a half sheet of yellow copy paper “Sister Carrie.” He had never thought of writing a novel until pressed to try his hand by Arthur Henry, his managing editor on the Toledo Blade and his most intimate friend. Henry was a glibly conventional writer of fiction, but he gave an appearance of flair, which Dreiser certainly lacked. He was an “emancipated” husband and assertive thinker in the ironic style favored by such end-of-the-century newspapermen as Stephen Crane—their representative man and attested genius. Like Dreiser’s future friend and pugnacious supporter, H. L. Mencken, Henry provided a figure of authority to Dreiser, who was to demonstrate awesome force as a social novelist but little personal self-confidence.
Dreiser had been scarred by the poverty and shiftlessness of his large family, the rigidity of his German Catholic father, his Mennonite mother’s seeming helplessness, and his own lack of formal education. To the end of his life, when he managed to die a member of the Communist Party and a communicant of one church after another, he was easily lulled by other people’s ideas. Henry, remembered today for his influence on the composition, editing, and publishing of Sister Carrie in 1900, made himself important to Dreiser. He prodded “his” reporter to write his first short stories when Dreiser wanted to write plays; he cut a good many sentences and paragraphs out of the manuscript of Sister Carrie, largely on the ground that Dreiser’s philosophizing over the fate of his characters was not necessary to the remorseless tread of the novel. He pushed Dreiser to hold Doubleday, Page and Company to its agreement when Frank Doubleday, shocked by Carrie’s failure to suffer appropriately after living with two men (he was also prodded by Mrs. Doubleday’s displeasure), tried to get out of publishing the novel.
Henry may also have been a model to the Dreiser who, after marrying the pretty redheaded schoolteacher he had fallen in love with at the fair, became as restless as Drouet and Hurstwood in Sister Carrie. Henry had with great aplomb left his wife for Anna T. Mallon, who was also to have an effect on the published version of Sister Carrie. She ran a typing agency and had the manuscript typed up by a succession of her “girls” as a favor to Dreiser; they also found things to correct in the always “correctable” Dreiser.
“My mind was a blank except for the name. I had no idea who or what she was to be.… There was something mystic about it, as if I were being used, like a medium.” When Dreiser, “as if in a trance,” began his novel, he was thinking of his sister Emma, who had run off to New York with a married man, L. A. Hopkins, a cashier in Chapin and Gore’s tavern in Chicago. Hopkins had panicked when his wife learned of his affair with Emma and had absconded with thirty-five hundred dollars. This rash act provided the basis for the central scene in Sister Carrie (duplicated for the power of “accident” only by the boating “accident” in An American Tragedy) in which Hurstwood takes ten thousand dollars from his employer’s safe quite without meaning to. In An American Tragedy Clyde Griffiths, who wants to be rid of his pregnant mistress, Roberta Alden, watches her drown without technically killing her. In both novels—and this is Dreiser’s lasting achievement—“accidental” crime forcibly illustrates Dreiser’s belief that we do what a “voice” within us tells us to do. That voice is the criminal, thief, and murderer in us that everything in our laborious upbringing and officially moral civilization tries to suppress. The true source and inspiration of our actions is always unexpected. Civilization is an ordeal. Inwardly, we are always in flight.
Hurstwood is unable to put the money back in the locked safe and, suddenly released by the fact that he cannot put it back, persuades Carrie to run off with him, first to Montreal, where they have a mock wedding ceremony, then to New York. In New York Hurstwood soon goes through what money he has left after returning most of the stolen funds, and after a series of catastrophes in business he falls apart. Carrie leaves him and becomes a successful actress. Hurstwood gasses himself in a flophouse.
Hurstwood is the active center of the novel, not Carrie. The most celebrated feature of the novel is Hurstwood’s collapse in New York; he changes rapidly and shockingly from a smoothly self-assured saloon manager into a derelict. When William Heinemann published Sister Carrie in England, he thought the novel so much Hurstwood’s story that he had the opening two hundred pages, before Hurstwood appears, cut to eighty-four. Dreiser was right, of course, to keep the original title when Frank Doubleday, reluctantly publishing the novel in 1900, wanted to call it The Flesh and the Spirit. Dreiser not only saw Carrie as a catalyst of Hurstwood’s startling collapse; he saw her, in all her early timidity and lasting silence, as the deepest possible force, the role he naturally assigned to women. To the always alienated and radical Dreiser, Carrie represents the power of transformation, the woman as catalyst. At the same time, he identified with her—in this respect she was truly his “sister”—as a wondering, brooding center of perception.
If Carrie is the precipitant, Hurstwood is the stage on which Dreiser’s first American tragedy is unrolled. The tragedy is that Americans may have nothing to live for but the “bitch-goddess.” Dreiser, far outside the area of James’s moral concern, knew that for such a man as Hurstwood, success included the acquisition of Carrie at any risk. So much sexual greed, shocking as it may have been to those who would not admit lust as a counterpart of the general acquisitiveness, was inherent in Dreiser himself. It gave force to his novel. His own furious sexuality he interpreted as a protest against American hypocrisy in all things. In the unforeseen creation of Hurstwood (he bore no resemblance to the forgettable embezzler with whom sister Emma had run off—they had ended up in New York placidly renting out rooms for “immoral purposes”) Dreiser revealed the deepest traces in his own soul not only of Hurstwood’s passion but of Hurstwood’s failure of nerve. After Sister Carrie was killed by its own publisher, Dreiser actually went through a nervous collapse amazingly like Hurstwood’s and was himself on the point of suicide when he was rescued by his brother Paul, the successful songwriter and man of the theater with whom “Theo” had written “On the Banks of the Wabash.”
Dreiser was no sooner recovered than he began to write fawning portraits of business leaders for a magazine called Success. As editor of Butterick’s, he carefully kept out of that ladies’ magazine examples of the new realistic fiction. But Dreiser identified with Hurstwood’s pursuit of woman and of the “bitch-goddess,” and he knew all too well the panic that is always the underside of that pursuit. He incarnated in Carrie the unconscious force of sex that Henry James never allowed his heroines, who were triumphantly moral in life (Isabel Archer, Maggie Verver) or in death (Milly Theale). Henry Adams, in the famous meditation “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” “asking himself whether he knew of any American artist who had ever insisted on the power of sex,” could come up only with Whitman. Adams certainly liked to see woman as goddess. He would have resisted the “lure” of Carrie even if the book had come to his attention. She was lower-class and too much trouble.
Carrie and Hurstwood were both aspects of Dreiser himself. They represented the underside of American life, which was all too familiar to him. When he was eleven, the distressed Dreiser family made a new home in Evansville, Indiana, thanks to Annie Brace, the madame of a local brothel who was his brother Paul’s mistress. His “Carrie” sister ran off with an embezzler; his “Jennie Gerhardt” sister, as the novel relates, became the mistress of a politician. Dreiser as a young laundry-wagon driver in Chicago kept back some of the collections from his employer. To the end of his life he never lost a sense of his own insignificance, of the ambition necessary to savage new forces. But it was his sense of force, desperately as he tried to locate this in the conventional determinism of his generation, that gave him his startling grasp of human drift and accident in all things. Only Dreiser would have been stopped in the writing of the most powerful scene in Sister Carrie, Hurstwood’s deterioriation, because “Somehow, I felt unworthy to write all that. It seemed too big, too baffling.”
The artist in Dreiser was always stronger than the man. Few writers with Dreiser’s power had such crude verbal habits, such rudimentary instincts about life. A writer brought up with the “proper” English of a middle-class family in the Midwest would not have introduced Carrie as possessing “four dollars in money.” We learn at the outset that “she could scarcely toss her head gracefully,” just as we are told on meeting Hurstwood that “Fitzgerald and Moy’s Adams Street place” was “really a gorgeous saloon from a Chicago standpoint.… It was a truly swell saloon.”
Dreiser’s unimpeachable sense of social fact led him to report that Hurstwood spent all of one dollar and fifty cents for dinner, that Carrie at the shoe factory earned three dollars and fifty cents a week, and that for her first day at work she “dressed herself in a worn shirt-waist of dotted blue percale, a skirt of light brown serge rather faded, and a small straw hat which she had worn all summer at Columbia City.” At the shoe factory “the whole atmosphere was one of hard contract.” Dreiser occasionally interrupted his own story to sigh and “philosophize” over the irreversible actions of his characters; he was swept up by the process he was recounting, item by item, with such hard logic. Despite these clumsy interventions, no other “reportorial realist” could have led his heroine so convincingly into Carrie’s crisis.* She becomes ill and loses her job before Drouet takes her over. Her numbness, shyness, and outward submissiveness are powerfully contrasted with the compulsions of the market system and the ravages of a Chicago winter.
Unable to understand, much less to resist, the “forces” that surround this “waif,” and virtually forced out of her sister’s dreary flat when she loses her job, Carrie allows herself to be bought by Drouet, the flashy drummer whom she had met on the train that first brought her to Chicago. We see how right Dreiser was to warn us, at the opening of Carrie’s journey to the big city, that “self-interest with her was high, but not strong. It was, nevertheless, her guiding characteristic.” In the chapters following Carrie’s fall from virtue, we see that while there is nothing heroic about her, her submission is also natural to the highly limited person she is. It will not take her long to see how shallow Drouet is, but her own automatism is not really clear to her.
Carrie—this is Dreiser’s “modern” insight—is a construction of society. Her assets are a certain prettiness and a “dawning” sensibility rather than a trained intelligence—a sensibility in which Dreiser portrayed his own conscious makeup. Carrie’s success (not Hurstwood’s collapse) makes her increasingly “ponder” her life and, near the end of the book, “dream such happiness as you may never feel.” She will never lose her essential passivity, her “wondering,” the unconscious cruelty of being able to captivate Drouet, to infatuate and ruin Hurstwood, without herself coming to any realization about them. In some cardinal meaning of the word, Carrie is innocent—in the sense that she is lacking. Naively wrapped up in her own life, she is unable to imagine another’s. This may be the fate of “modern” people whose personalities are constructed for them by “want” and fulfilled by “society.” There were to be more and more people with nothing of their own but a desire for “happiness.” This, as much as the selfishness sanctioned by the market system, Dreiser may have had in mind when he said that the whole atmosphere of Carrie’s first factory was one of hard contract. We finally see Carrie in her famous rocking chair; she broods and broods over the mystery of it all without seeing anything more clearly than she did on the day she set out for Chicago.
How did a character so passive and composed of so much inert “wondering” come to have a strong and altogether compelling novel written around her? Carrie is hardly a designing femme fatale, and The Flesh and the Spirit would have been an irrelevant as well as a meretricious title for a book that turns as much on Carrie’s passivity as on Hurstwood’s lust. Carrie haunts the novel that bears her name because she represents the force of sex, the challenge to the established mores, that can make even a wistful and ignorant young girl irresistible to men who are wrapped up in the daily pursuit of profit. Her original helplessness when confronted with Chicago, her sliding into a life with Drouet and Hurstwood that she hardly anticipated, the stage success she never planned or even understood, convey Dreiser’s view of the modern soul’s merging into a situation from which mind and affection remain detached. Classical tragedy was based on human limitation—the larger struggle with the universe was always in view. Modern tragedy is unreflectiveness, apartness in our hearts from the lives we actually live and drive others to live. The first chapter title in Sister Carrie is “The Magnet Attracting: A Waif Amid Forces.” This “waif” will never really know what is happening to her. Her sexuality is as incomprehensible to Carrie, as fatal to Hurstwood, as nature was to primitive man. This sexuality accomplishes a revolution in people’s lives, however, and in 1900 it was recognized as a threat to the established order.
Dreiser did not altogether see this himself. Like Whitman, the stranger “to our ways” disturbed the secularized Protestant elect who had replaced religion with morality and morality with propriety. Unlike Whitman, he attempted to construct no new world of the spirit, no personal world. Always feeling himself rejectable, he did not understand the challenge he represented. What he did understand was that Carrie and Hurstwood are caught up in a situation beyond their power of reflection (and beyond Dreiser’s), though he would struggle all his life with “science” and Spencer’s “The Unknowable,” and with his ultimate wistfulness would confess, “Sometimes I see myself as a hoop in an arc reaching over from one phase of existence to another.” From which it followed that what a writer had to do was not only to narrate the sequence of force, to develop the inevitability of the plot, but also—as the Greek chorus did in the face of the destiny inflicted on human beings—to cry out in fragmented and sometimes helpless speech.
All his life Dreiser was told how inadequate a writer he was; he must also have been aware of how unconventional a first novel he had written, for to assure its publication some thirty-six thousand words were cut out of the manuscript by Arthur Henry, Dreiser’s wife, and Dreiser himself. The original manuscript is more explicit about the sexual illegitimacy that is so important to the book. In it Carrie struggles with herself about moving in with Drouet and about leaving Drouet for Hurstwood (to whom she is deeply attracted). At the same time it is made clear that Drouet went on philandering even after he had coaxed Carrie into his bed, and that Hurstwood frequented prostitutes after he had lured Carrie to New York. The atmosphere of the original is steamier and more truthful to the characters of birds of passage like Drouet and Hurstwood. Carrie and Hurstwood make love in their Montreal hotel room before they go through the bigamous wedding ceremony. We are more aware than ever of Hurstwood’s desperate character. He hated his wife but stayed with her as long as “she loved him vigorously.”
Arthur Henry, who did most of the cutting, did not always understand what Dreiser was after. In eliminating Dreiser’s pointed judgment of Hurstwood—“He saw a trifle more clearly the necessities of our social organization, but he was more unscrupulous in the matter of sinning against it”—Henry eliminated our own need to anticipate Hurstwood’s actual subtlety. Although nothing in the original version prepares us for Hurstwood’s disintegration, we still need to know more about the hidden forces in this strange man. His real secret is his essential despair over those things he can barely hold on to. Dreiser originally ended the book with Hurstwood’s suicide, which confirms our premonition of his desperate nature.
To end the book with Hurstwood’s death was more in keeping with the social logic of Sister Carrie than Carrie’s stage musings from her rocking chair (“Oh, the tangle of human life”). But Hurstwood, as always, made Dreiser uneasy. Dreiser wandered off to the Palisades one day (the book was largely written on the upper West Side of New York) and finished off the story with the generalized meditation that ends, “Oh, Carrie! Carrie! Oh, blind strivings of the human heart!” He had begun by writing “Sister Carrie” as if in a trance; he had to return to Carrie in the end. She duplicated the young Dreiser, who was full of feeling and, in the person of Carrie, not beyond pitying himself. He had to carry her to this rhetorical finale in order to deliver her from the conventional world. That defiance was what he cared about most; it was the secret message of the novel. His publisher in New York, Frank Doubleday, understood this well enough when he did his best to kill the book.
Mark Twain was in Chicago several times in 1893, the summer of the fair, but was so entangled in business affairs that he never got to see it. Nor did Henry Adams’s black butler, who had come out with Adams and his friends in the private railway carriage of Senator Don Cameron, Pennsylvania’s political boss, in order to cook for them. Adams, benevolently inquiring what his butler thought of the fair, was surprised to hear that he had been too busy looking after the Adams party.
Mark Twain, always the showman with his eye on the dollar, originally thought that it would be suitable for the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery to dig up Columbus’s bones and exhibit them in Chicago.
No other writer made so much of the fair, was more impressed with the symbol of American “unity” that Chicago provided, than that constant traveller and increasingly bitter observer, Henry Adams. For the opening in May, Adams was usually with Elizabeth Cameron, the elderly Senator Cameron’s much younger wife. No one will ever know just how intimate Adams was with her or how intimate he would have liked to be. Adams always wrote to her as though he were in love with her, and since Senator Cameron (who was even older than Adams) was never far away, it is probable that with his usual delight in women of his class who possessed Elizabeth Cameron’s charm and intelligence, the widower Adams was able without risk to enjoy the delight (and mischief) of public courtship. He managed, as usual, to make literature out of his passionate wistfulness toward Mrs. Cameron—his letters to her are as wonderful as anything this publicly frigid man ever wrote.
Adams soon left Chicago for his summer in France and the enraptured study of the medieval. Then the Panic of 1893, which was to launch the worst depression in American history, brought Adams home to save the family investments. Henry in the 1870s had documented the machinations on Wall Street of Jay Gould and Jim Fiske; his meticulous scholarship extended to all matters of finance. He handled the Panic so well that by September, he relates in the “Chicago (1893)” chapter of the Education, “the storm having partly blown over, life had taken on a new face, and one so interesting that he set off to Chicago to study the Exposition again, and stayed there a fortnight absorbed in it. He found matter of study to fill a hundred years, and his education spread over chaos.”
The coolness of this, the surface air of personal intactness and detached curiosity, were in Adams’s most practiced Mandarin manner. In the Education, that masterpiece representing the “unity” of Henry Adams without a hint of the cracks, he managed to gloss over the inclusive despair and political hatred that erupted in his letters. But his letters are his autobiography; the Education is a book about the nineteenth century—whose transformations, making the United States a great power, Adams thought he could measure. His personal sense of powerlessness and “failure”—the wrong people taking over—coincided with his increasing determination to quantify the new technology, to apply science to history. He was sure that the staggering new power would eventually break down from the “entropy” that operated in all closed systems. But the more his vision of “chaos” excited him, the more he grandly assumed the air of the objective historian.
Adams “professed the religion of World’s Fairs.” He liked a panoramic view in everything, for this promised “education”; he was particularly impressed by exhibitions of the latest technology.
The new American … was the child of steam and the brother of the dynamo, and already, within less than thirty years, this mass of mixed humanities, brought together by steam, was squeezed and welded into approach to shape; a product of so much mechanical power, and bearing no distinctive marks but that of pressure. The new American like the new European was the servant of the power-house, as the European of the twelfth century was the servant of the Church.
Adams saw the new technology, as he saw everything else, as an index of change. Unable to forget how his own class had panicked with the stock market—his brother John Quincy was in a few months to die of the strain—he saw determinism behind every panorama. “Blindly, some very powerful energy was at work, doing something that nobody wanted.” What a contrast the brilliant new technology on exhibition at Chicago made with the faltering American economy! With the condescension that had now become second nature to him, Adams “admitted” the exposition “to be a sort of industrial, speculative growth and product of the Beaux Arts artistically induced to pass the summer on the shore of Lake Michigan.” What impressed him was the ability of American energy to concentrate itself equally on the dynamo and on the neoclassic Beaux-Arts style that dominated the fair. He sneered that the exposition “seemed to have leaped directly from Corinth and Syracuse and Venice, over the heads of London and New York, to impose classical standards on plastic Chicago.”
Adams, a traditionalist in everything except the application of “science” to history, of course had no complaint against the Beaux-Arts style’s temporarily taking over Chicago. Perhaps he guessed that the marble-white façades were “staff,” plaster of paris. The fair was the first no-expense-barred movie set. With his synoptic gift for reading history at a glance, Adams reminded those pained by Chicago’s incongruous classicism that “all trading cities had always shown trader’s taste, and, to the stern purist of religious faith, no art was thinner than Venetian Gothic. All trader’s taste smelt of bric-à-brac; Chicago tried at least to give her taste a look of unity.”†
“Unity” was one of Adams’s central themes, along with “chaos” and “entropy,” which represented the opposite. “Unity” was an obsessive metaphor for any glorious past (like the Middle Ages he was to celebrate as a museum with walls—not for everybody—in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres). “Unity” stood for everything that had once been glorious, intact—and was now multiplying, dissipating into the randomness of a market economy and mass society. The center of Adams’s thought, the inescapable background of his personal “failure,” was by the nineties the unlimited acceleration of change. The modern world was rushing madly to an explosion of its uncontrollable energy. How much his wife’s suicide in 1885 had to do with Adams’s insistence on world catastrophe Adams never confided to anyone. He hardly knew himself. Like some leading nonfailures of the new industrial era—Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Henry James—Adams saw himself as the elegist of an innocent America obliterated by forces beyond control. “His world was dead,” he claimed to have felt as early as 1868, when he returned to America after spending the Civil War in England as private secretary to his father, the American minister.
Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow—not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs—but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he—American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him, and an education that had cost a civil war.… He was no worse off than the Indians or the buffalo who had been ejected from their heritage by his own people; but he vehemently insisted that … the defeat was not due to him, nor yet to any superiority of his rivals. He had been unfairly forced out of the track, and must get back into it as best he could.
Adams was a strenuously gifted man with the deepest possible instinct for showing his life as history. At the New York pier he could make a historical drama of his favorite hate, the East European Jews, though in 1868 they had not yet begun to arrive. At Chicago he had only to sit on the steps beneath Richard Morris Hunt’s Administration Building, the center of the exposition (a golden dome, astonishing to still-rustic Midwesterners, was meant to recall the Duomo in Florence and St. Peter’s in Rome), for Adams “to ponder … almost as deeply as on the steps of Ara Coeli”—where Gibbon in 1754 conceived The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Hunt, the favorite neoclassic architect to industrial magnates, had obviously reversed Chicago’s natural trend by his classicism. Adams, as conservative in the arts as he was unbounded in historical speculation, wrote as if Chicago’s pseudo-classicism would elevate the dumb masses.
If the rupture was real and the new American world could take this sharp and conscious twist towards ideals, one’s personal friends would come in, at last, as winners in the great American chariot-race for fame. If the people of the Northwest actually knew what was good when they saw it, they would some day talk about Hunt and Richardson, La Farge and St. Gaudens, Burnham and McKim, and Stanford White when their politicians and millionaires were otherwise forgotten.
The derision, as usual, was for both sides. Adams wrote that “art, to the Western people, was a state decoration; a diamond shirt-stud; a paper collar.” Easterners dominated the construction of the exposition as if by natural right. Chicago money wanted the tried and true, not pioneer functionalists like Louis Henri Sullivan. If the Chicago architect John Wellborn Root had not suddenly died just as the planning for the exposition began, it is possible that the stately white façade imposed on the lakefront, and interrupted only by Louis Sullivan’s Transportation Building, would not have had Root’s support. Harriet Monroe wrote in her biography of her brother-in-law that Root
wished to admit frankly in the architectural scheme the temporary character of the fair: it should be a great, joyous, luxuriant midsummer efflorescence … a splendid buoyant thing, flaunting its gay colors between the shifting blues of sky and lake exultantly, prodigally.… Edifices … should not give the illusion of a weight and permanence; they should be lighter, gayer, more decorative than the solid structures along our streets.
Louis Sullivan—“Form ever follows function”—said in bitterness that the money behind the exposition allowed the East to “win” artistically. Daniel Burnham, the chief of construction, hailed the third greatest event in American history—after the Revolution and the Civil War. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who did the hooded figure over Marian Adams’s grave, excitedly told Burnham, “Look here, old fellow, do you realize that this is the greatest meeting of artists alone since the fifteenth century?” Adams noted that the famous artists brought from the East had no interest in Chicago—“to them the Northwest refused to look artistic. They talked as though they worked only for themselves.” Louis Sullivan’s hopes for a distinct regional style would have meant as little to them as it did to Adams, who was to celebrate Chartres Cathedral as the only refuge from his scepticism.
Adams never mentioned Frederick Law Olmsted, the creator of the first public parks in America and a pioneer landscape architect, who laid out the grounds for the exposition. Olmsted distrusted its grandiosity. His ambition for Central Park, hard as that is to recall today, was to provide refreshment in nature for the contemplative individual. He did not wish to see great spectacles in his park or to encourage mass activity. Since the fair was synonymous with crowds, this most practical of democratic visionaries was attentive to the look of easily abashed people. Not McKim, Mead & White, not Richard Morris Hunt, not Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and certainly not Henry Adams, could have uttered Olmsted’s admonition to Daniel Burnham: “More incidents of vital human gaiety wanted. Expression of the crowd too business-like, common, dull, anxious and care-worn.”
Olmsted might have been describing Mark Twain in his time of troubles. That harried speculator had no time for the fair when he arrived in Chicago, a month before the grand opening, to salvage something from the ill-fated Paige typesetting machine. Instead of making him a millionaire, it had bankrupted him. Henry Adams, who was a millionaire and wrote that “life wore a new face” because he had saved the family investments, may have been indifferent to the depression that followed the Panic, but he hardly ignored it. It was another historical phenomenon. He “wanted to know what was wrong with the world that it should suddenly go smash without visible cause or possible advantage?” This was a question many people were asking as the imminent close of the century somehow coincided with the ebbing promise of American life. The members of the American Historical Association at the exposition heard Professor Frederick Jackson Turner explain that the frontier had provided the momentum of American history but was now closed. An era was over. Adams, pondering the sudden arrest of American energies, knew that “the young, rich continent was capable of supporting three times its population with ease.”
Still, Adams saw all American sorrows with detachment. As the century rushed to its end in a flurry of great-power rivalries, Adams would be more interested in world conflict than in the social misery filling up realism from Chicago. The Adamses had been diplomats in the service of the young republic before they had been anything else; Henry in his speculative way was more interested in world strategy than in the general welfare. He coolly ignored Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”; Turner, who never confronted anything besides the topic that made him famous, would soon attack Adams for not possessing a mind as provincial as his own. But Adams also bypassed Thorstein Veblen’s sardonic observations of the leisure class. Adams was more at ease with the Turkish ambassador in Washington, a cynic whose exposition of American corruption he had put into his novel Democracy.
The depression was so damaging to the exposition that fire in the buildings was attributed by Chicago’s chief of police to deputy United States marshals “who hoped to retain their positions by keeping up a semblance of disorder.” In 1894 Harper’s Weekly ran drawings of the unemployed sleeping in the stone corridors of office buildings. A hundred thousand men in the city were out of work. Jobless men from all over the country had collected in Chicago in hope of getting something at the “Great Fair.” While Governor William McKinley of Ohio hailed the fair as “the world spread out before us … something which the people of the United States, above all others, should feel it an imperative duty to see,” Chicago itself, with its often helpless mass of immigrants, was focussing the attention of settlement workers and photographers of “social conscience” like Lewis Hine. Pioneer sociologists thought the city a human disaster. The eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in its article “Chicago,” would explain early in the next century how institutions in the city differentiated “the good from the bad” among the poor, the “economically inefficient” from the “viciously pauper.” Henry Adams studying the new technology was interested not in how machines worked but in projecting theories of developing social chaos. Chicago was the great laboratory of social fact at the end of the century. It was the “wickedest city,” and not entirely because more than three-quarters of its people were foreign born or the children of immigrants. Florence Kelley at Hull House was showing that census figures could not be trusted. More than ten percent of the labor force in thousands of Chicago establishments were children under sixteen—bootblacks, newsboys, domestics, street peddlers, cash messengers in department stores.
In the depression of the mid-nineties more than seventy of the great railroads failed; five hundred banks and nearly sixteen thousand businesses soon collapsed. Mark Twain, losing everything in the failure of the Paige typesetting machine, wailed that “the billows of hell have been rolling over me.” He was not alone. In 1894 the Pullman Palace Car Company, which had accumulated twenty-five million dollars in surplus profits and had distributed in the past year two and one-half million dollars in dividends on its thirty-six-million-dollar capital, cut wages by a fourth but did not reduce rents in the company-owned houses of its “model community” in Pullman, Illinois. The workers went out on strike when Pullman refused to discuss their grievances. Eugene V. Debs’s American Railway Union took up their cause, and transportation was paralyzed throughout the North when the union boycotted all Pullman cars. President Grover Cleveland’s attorney general, Richard Olney, obtained an injunction against the union—under the Sherman Anti-Trust Law. Debs defied it and went to jail, where he became a socialist. Governor John Peter Altgeld of Illinois bitterly protested Cleveland’s sending in federal troops to break the strike. Since Altgeld had already outraged respectable opinion by freeing three anarchists arrested in connection with the Haymarket affair, he was defeated for reelection.‡ The effulgence of the World’s Columbian Exposition, never to be forgotten by those who had seen the great central Court of Honor under floodlights, was nevertheless a thing of the past.
The Mark Twain who never got to see the fair, tormented by business worries, more the victim of money lust than the Wild West promoters, prospectors, and failures in his books, lived the nineteenth century to the full. He should have exhibited himself at the fair; Mark Twain was a greater testimonial to the Columbian Exposition than any of its industrial exhibits. He had grown up along the frontier, moved west with it, turned himself into its representative character even when he mocked its legend of endless promise. No other American writer suggested so much of its brawling energy, its background of violence, its readiness for make-believe. No other, as the “Great Century” rushed to its end on the usual American roller coaster of ups and downs, “flush times” and panic, national brag and breadlines, hunger marches and empire, was to feel himself both America’s favorite and “God’s fool.”
Emerson had once thought that nature in America was too much for man. Industrial man, thinking he could supplant nature, had become too much for himself and could find no friendly echo or support in the universe. The human critter, “the damned human race,” as Mark Twain liked to thunder, was the root of all evil. As his affairs failed, as his wife and most of his children died, as the sweet old roughness of the frontier became a lost world to pursue, Mark Twain was faced, Lear-like, with his own hypertrophic ego dominating everything except his native terror. In the last years of his century, this all-too-representative American, the old derelict, God’s fool, experienced a savage homelessness in the good old United States in its new world of empire.
He was to live it all—early hardship, the gush of dollars from the time he gaily announced that his first book, The Innocents Abroad, “sells along just like the Bible,” the return in imagination to Hannibal while he was living the opulent life in Hartford, the inveterate gambler’s need to put everything he had on the fatal typesetting machine, the demonstrative family love of which he said, “the greater the love the greater the tragedy.” There was his constant thought and talk of money, the frantic moving about, and the sudden flights to Europe—as many surges of prosperity and panic as the country itself experienced. He was not the Lincoln of our literature, but he was certainly Lincoln’s countryman. His weariness and disgust with the “race” found their correlation in his country. He was shocked by the “United States of Lyncherdom,” driven back into himself and his earliest fears of religion by the oily virtuousness behind which Americans hid their propensity to violence. The nineteenth century, expiring to the noisy Wagnerian trumpet calls of blood lust, war, racial savagery, imperialism, did not overlook God’s own country. But Mark Twain, more than most, was still shockable. He reacted furiously—though mostly in private—to the brazenness with which his beloved frontier democracy was pushing itself forward as an American empire after coolly knocking down Spain and brutally suppressing native protests against its de-facto acquisition of the Philippines.
It was typical of Mark Twain “in eruption,” so proud of brandishing “a pen warmed-up in hell,” to leave so much of his protest in manuscript. He had never written so much as he did in his last years, and never before had he been afraid of getting published. He not only confided his bitterest thoughts to a rambling autobiography, to notebooks and letters, but somehow he made sure that his sharpest shafts from the grave against orthodox Christianity, like The Mysterious Stranger, would be found in so many versions that only near the end of the next century would his real intentions be exposed. One volume of posthumous papers, sketches, and diatribes, edited by Bernard De Voto as Letters from the Earth, was ready in 1939 but was not published until 1962 because Mark Twain’s only surviving child, Clara, refused permission to publish material that “distorted” her father’s “real ideas.”
Yet if anything is clear about Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the last twenty years of his life, it is that his exasperation with “man” was founded on a need to reverse the biblical account of God’s providence and man’s moral responsibility. In these years Mark Twain played the village atheist with a vengeance, and even though he unwittingly kept to the determinism of his Presbyterian upbringing, he turned it into a grimly assertive denial of God’s grace and man’s possibility of salvation. He was of the Devil’s party now, and he knew it. His first instinct was to attempt to roll back the biblical account of sin; his own proverbs of hell were meant to show that God, by insisting on the “moral sense,” was really evil. The Satanic visitor to the world of men in The Mysterious Stranger showed by his neutrality and indifference to their affairs that he alone could assist man in freeing himself from his greatest burden—guilt.
Success had not made Mark Twain feel “guilty”; it just established what William James called the religion of chronic anxiety. But success like Mark Twain’s bred the expectancy of failure, a personal conviction of wrongdoing, that reproduced “panic” in the business cycle. It turned the world to ashes and intensified Mark Twain’s readiness to feel that his magic journey from West to East was really a dream after all. Nothing was what it seemed, so perhaps nothing had really happened. Why did he now always wear white? To be the “only clean man in a dirty world.”
Innocence was of the West, it was childhood, newness, the great legend of American beginnings. It was real things. But destiny was in the East, where abstractions took over and broke the innocent heart that was trying to enlist them to the human order.
“That’s my Middle West,” F. Scott Fitzgerald was to write fifteen years after Mark Twain died, “not the wheat or prairies or the lost Swede towns.… I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” Yet Mark Twain, taking that for granted as the bitter sum of his life, was still of his own century and so had a quarrel with God. The “drifter” had always been proud of letting his mind go where it liked. That was the one constant in the American succession, the Emersonian legacy: the unconscious mind as oracle. Howells thought of his friend as the embodiment of what William James in 1890 first called the stream of consciousness. Howells was amazed by Mark Twain’s perfect naturalness. This of course was Mark Twain’s own opinion, and in his (largely dictated) Autobiography he was proud of writing “a book that never goes straight for a minute, but goes, and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically … but always going.… Nothing to do but make the trip; the how of it is not important, so that the trip is made.”
Mark Twain had not counted on being locked up in his own spontaneity. He could not withstand his own deepest reactions to the Wall Street plunderers who were nevertheless of the class that put him together again when he was financially ruined. He hated the Spanish-American War, hated missionaries in China paving the way for commercial concessions, hated professional patriots, hated Theodore Roosevelt. But these were all popular passions, and he was out of step. So, much as he now liked to think of himself as a spoilsport and a wicked fellow, it did not suit him to be outside the consensus.
The “moral sentiment” was at fault; it was supposed to be innate, and Mark Twain believed in nothing that was not. His guilt was so crushing that he could escape it only by wishing the damned human race away. That was the real message of The Mysterious Stranger and of his cocky essays in determinism like What Is Man? Since man’s greatest folly is to assume that he makes a difference for good because God invested him with His own importance and dignity, the only way out of such a conceit, which tolerates the corruption of society and the poisoning of the earth, is to blot the whole thing out. Speeding back to the mysterious beginnings of things in the Bible, lampooning the Bible’s self-centered view of man, Mark Twain (always a romantic rebel at heart, if not in his books) made Satan his God, his charge against humanity.
Satan was a relief after Jehovah: he was indifferently benign, contemptuous of man’s preposterous belief in his own importance.
It is true that which I have revealed to you: there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!
Speeding all the way back to the creation, which now he annulled, Mark Twain said that it all came to a dream because be was alone with his own consciousness. The writer’s old glory in his own mind had become an island consciousness, man alone with his own mind, a solipsism all too familiar in the scepticism that marked the end of the century. Of course there was a contradiction in Mark Twain’s reversals of the Bible, for he never ceased to assail the God who had instilled the “moral sense.” No God but the God who had created guilt! In the end Mark Twain’s incisive hope, his only paradise, was that he alone would in imagination rewrite the world. If ever a man lived a dream, it was Mark Twain when he came to the end of his dream.
*“Reportorial realist” was the phrase used by the reader for Harper and Brothers who turned down Sister Carrie. “I cannot conceive of the book arousing the interest or inviting the attention, after the opening chapters, of the feminine readers who control the destinies of so many novels.”
†In 1904, sniffily disapproving of the “hard” prosperity he saw in New York’s Central Park, Henry James yet consoled himself. “It was not, certainly, for general style, pride and colour, a Paul Veronese company … my vision has a kind of analogy; for what were the Venetians, after all, but the children of a Republic and of trade?”
‡As an anarchist meeting in Chicago’s Haymarket Square was breaking up, an unknown person threw a bomb that killed several policemen and wounded several more. Although no proof of their responsibility was given, four leading anarchists were charged with inciting the assassin and hanged; three more were imprisoned for life.