THE OLD-FASHIONED AMERICAN
David Graham Phillips affords an interesting illustration of the power
of bourgeois criticism to suppress and abolish those writers who
threaten its ideology. He was by all odds the greatest novelist of the
period in which he wrote, a sturdy and vigorous personality, who looked
at the world about him with his own eyes and really had something to
say. He was worth a dozen of the imitation novelists who were acclaimed
as great during the first ten years of the century. But Phillips was a
“muck-rake man,” a prophet and a satirist; therefore the critics
patronized him, and since his death they have forgotten him. No
biography has been published, and a new generation will have to make the
discovery that he wrote the biggest piece of American fiction of his
time.
Phillips was eleven years older than myself, but we arrived upon the
literary scene together, and I used to meet him now and then in New
York. I have an idea that I annoyed him; he was generous in praising my
books, but that did not satisfy me--I wanted to make a Socialist out of
him, and he would not have it! He was the genuine old-fashioned
American, the wearer of square-toed shoes and a string tie. I do not
mean that I ever saw him in that costume, but that his view of human
society was derived from that period. He came from the Middle West, and
believed in the simple, small-town democracy he had there known. A man
of common sense, he hated all forms of social pretense and finickyness.
Like a good American, he respected money and the power of money, but he
wanted the people who had this power to behave like sensible human
beings, and he was infuriated because they took to putting on “side,”
getting English butlers and five footmen in livery.
He blamed this especially on the women. He loathed the modern parasitic
female, to the extent of some twenty volumes, exposing every aspect of
her foolishness and empty-headedness. She it was who dragged men to
ruin, she caused the corruption of government and a general riot of
greed, in order that she might have silk stockings and jewels and
servants. She had spurned the jobs of cooking and sewing and making
home, without ever having taken the trouble to learn to do these
efficiently. Now she couldn’t do even her foolish society job; she
couldn’t run a rich man’s household and be an intelligent companion, she
couldn’t bear healthy children, or raise them to be anything but
shirkers.
Proper people were shocked by Phillips because he talked so plainly, and
fastidious people considered him coarse. As a matter of fact, he was a
man of tender heart and true refinement, who put on an aspect of rough
common sense as a matter of principle. Cut out all this nonsense, he
seems to say to his readers; you know we all want money, we all like
comfort, we are all selfish creatures; you women especially are making
silly pretenses, you know you have to be kept, and you prefer a man who
is self-willed and masterful, a fighting man. So he recorded “The
Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig,” and irritated many fine ladies.
So in “Old Wives for New” he preaches the common sense idea, that if a
woman is lazy and sluttish and refuses to work at her job as wife, her
husband is justified in getting rid of her and marrying a young and
attractive woman. In “The Hungry Heart” he deals with the eternal
triangle, and shows a husband forgiving an erring wife--which you would
think was good Christian doctrine, but which is contrary to fancy
notions of sexual implacability. In “The Husband’s Story” he portrays a
wife who marries a man because she believes he will succeed; she helps
him to succeed, and they rise high, but finding that the higher they
get, the less interest there is in life.
Phillips was not content with preaching in his novels; he wrote a book,
a general scolding at “The Age of Gilt.” Here you see the old-fashioned
gentleman from Indiana, an individualist, but a hater of monopoly and
privilege, a modern Isaiah denouncing graft and greed. The “Cosmopolitan
Magazine” lured him into writing a series of articles about the gang
which was selling out our government; “The Treason of the Senate,” the
articles were called, and they made an enormous uproar. Theodore
Roosevelt made a speech denouncing “muck-rake men,” which was very
plainly aimed at Phillips. Afterwards, in his character as Mr.
Facing-Bothways, Roosevelt made an attempt to get information from
Phillips, for use in his fight against the Senate. Let me testify that
only a few weeks before Roosevelt made this “muck-rake” speech, I sat at
his dinner-table in the White House and heard him call the roll of these
very same senators, naming them according to the interests they
served--the senator from the Steel Trust, the senator from the Copper
Trust, and so on. I recall the description of Hale of Maine, the senator
from the Shipping Trust: “the most innately and essentially malevolent
scoundrel that God Almighty ever put on earth!”
The entire writing life of Phillips was barely ten years, and in that
period he worked incessantly, rewriting and revising with painful
conscientiousness. His stories were successful as serials, and I
remember once teasing him because they were always of the right length
for the purpose; I wished that mine would behave in that convenient way.
The jest apparently troubled him, for he referred to it on several
occasions. He did not tell me that for ten years he had been working in
secret upon a novel of three hundred thousand words!
He left that when he died, and it waited five years for a magazine to
get up the courage to print extracts from it. We have it now in two
volumes, “Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise.” Its heroine is a girl who
bears the brand of illegitimacy, and runs away from home to escape it;
but they bring her back and marry her off to an elderly farmer, and the
picture of her bridal night is one of the unforgettable scenes of
American fiction. Susan is ignorant of the world, a flower in the mud.
Groping for light, she escapes again, and tries to earn her living in a
box factory, and undergoes all the horrors of tenement life. Starved
out, she takes to the streets in Cincinnati, and we see the graft and
cruelty of city government. She is taken up as the mistress of a
politician and travels with him in Europe. But always she is reaching
toward something better; her spirit remains untarnished, and in the end
she becomes a successful actress.
This story, of course, shocked the orthodox and respectable. It was a
new kind of romanticism, familiar enough to Europe, but not to us. Could
a woman’s soul remain pure while her body was sullied? The critics
denied it; but, as it happens, several women of that sort have made
their appearance since Phillips wrote--for example, the author of
“Madeleine,” who had equally degrading experiences to tell, and yet kept
her soul, and is working to help the downtrodden part of her sex.
Nothing offends bourgeois respectables more than the statement that
women are driven to prostitution by economic forces. They like to
believe that the women of the poor are naturally depraved; also, they
don’t want working girls made discontented with their lot, and they
don’t want social reformers poking their noses into box factories and
department-stores. So they call “Susan Lenox” an immoral book, and it is
taboo in libraries and reviews.
But as a matter of fact, David Graham Phillips shows himself in this
book a thoroughly bourgeois person, safely and wholesomely “American” in
his whole-hearted acceptance of the doctrine that a woman cannot and
ought not try to live without comfort. Susan’s experience in the box
factory is brief; she suffers, both in mind and body, but not so deeply
that she cannot bear to leave the working class, and rise above it, and
win fame and fortune by entertaining the master class, in that kind of
prostitution known as the capitalist theatre. It does not occur to her
to conceive a passionate ideal of sisterhood with all the oppressed
factory workers; to hang on to her job with them, and teach and organize
them, and lead them in a strike for better working conditions and higher
wages.
That, you see, is another method by which a heroine could develop a
beautiful soul; another path by which she could break into the world of
intellect and power--the way of class-consciousness and solidarity. But
David Graham Phillips did not understand the revolutionary psychology,
and could not have imparted it to his heroine; he was bound by the
limitations of a small-town man from Indiana, a graduate of Princeton
University, a city editor of capitalist newspapers. I read the scant
records of his life, and find a leading critic praising him because he
had “no panaceas”; meaning that the critic liked him because his
thinking was as muddled as the critic’s.
The old-fashioned American has preached us a tremendous and moving
sermon, putting his whole heart into it; and it would be pleasant to be
able to express for it the same unquestioning reverence as Mr. Robert W.
Chambers, who writes the introduction to the book. But truth requires
me to point out that Phillips avoids having his heroine contract
venereal disease--something which might decidedly have affected the
beauty of her soul. Also, she manages to preserve her beauty, in spite
of the part which getting men drunk plays in the life of a
street-walker. In other words, he idealizes prostitution as a career for
women, in order to give it the advantage over the box factory.
It is very significant that he fails to take us into this factory and
show us the work; all we get is Susan’s interviews with the boss in his
office. We do not meet the other women, except the one with whom Susan
starves in her tenement room. So we fail to realize that Susan’s
solution of her problem is not the solution for all women. There have to
be boxes, as well as sex gratification, in the capitalist world; and
thousands of women must hold their box-making jobs. They lose their hair
and teeth, sometimes their fingers, and always their beauty; but they
acquire class-consciousness; and here and there a genius among them, by
incredible heroic labors, gets a bit of knowledge and becomes a leader.
So, out of the whole mass-misery results organization, and that labor
movement which is the germ of the new society, taking form, according to
the wondrous process of nature, inside the shell of the old.
But of all this we get no hint in “Susan Lenox”; a middle-class story,
written by a middle-class man about a middle-class girl who descends for
a short period into the inferno of working-class life, and then
magically rises out of it again. If David Graham Phillips had written
the story of a working-class girl, who stayed with the working class and
learned working-class lessons--why then all critics would have indicted
him for the crime of having a “panacea,” and “Susan Lenox” would have
waited, not five years, but fifty years, for publication in a popular
magazine!