Black on White

The current issue of “The Nation” publishes an enlightening case study in psychopathic anti-Semitism. The patient, who has a virulent attack of the phobia, is none other than Theodore Dreiser, who despite this and other mental aberrations is a great novelist. The documents are a couple of letters which Dreiser wrote about fifteen months ago, possibly without considering too closely the likelihood that they would ultimately see type.

Under the muddied thinking and malodorous prejudice and lame apologetics of Dreiser’s effusions is one clear, reiterated and indubitable fact: that there are too many Jews in America for Dreiser’s psychological comfort. They annoy him by their mere existence. In places like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, in particular, he is distressed by their ubiquitous presence.

His letters, in fact, degenerate into an infantile complaint that s##tisticians lie about the size of this Semitic plague. The 1927 census he wails, lists only 4,288,000 Jews in the United States whereas his artistic nerves register billions.

What about the “half-Jews and quarter-Jews,” he asks. (Oh shades of Nazi logic!) What about the dastardly Jews who change their names and “deliberately pass for Americans,” he exclaims. (The Dreiser family, if I recall his autobiography correctly, used to be Dresser at one time, before it deliberately passed for American.)

Against the “World Almanac’s” word that there were 1,765,000 Jews in New York in 1927 and 325,000 in Chicago, Dreiser advances his “impression” on Jewish holidays that those cities are populated almost exclusively of Jews.

This awareness of Jews everywhere, tangled in his hair, littered in his path, swimming in his soup, is the most characteristic symptom of the anti-Semitic phobia. Whatever else he may say to soothe his own outraged “mod###” conscience or to placate his starkly on the surface for anyone starkly o nthe surface for anyone to go wrong on the diagnosis. It is a dead give-away.

At the time these letters were written Dreiser was still in the forefront of the intellectual wing of the American Communist movement, although not a member of the Party. Where he stands today I do not know; perhaps he doesn’t either. In any event, he was close enough to the Left to observe that Jews contribute at least their proportionate share to anti-capitalist forces.

Under these circumstances one of his remarks is especially interesting. He blames it upon “Jews discussing Jews,” but that is a transparent device for making his point. Jews, in his view, “have the single objective of plenty of money.” Nothing but the virulence of his phobia could have blinded him to the fact that the Jewish failing is much more likely to be in exactly the opposite direction — towards an excess of idealism, a readiness to sacrifice for humanity, an unconquerable urge towards utopias for the world at large, including its Dreisers.

Like Father Coughlin or the most ignorant anti-Semite of humble degree, Dreiser thinks of Jews as “money-changers.” Indeed, he thinks of anything he does not like as Jewish. That, too, is typical in an advanced stage of his aberration.

Curiously, it just happens that love of lucre is one of Dreiser’s chief personal failings and one which he repeatedly admits and explains in his writings. His autobiographical books are in many ways a cumulative explanation of his terrific thirst for money and comfort and social position, as compensation for his poverty-stricken youth. This “single objective of plenty of money” for which he indicts the Jews is the failing of Dreiser and of capitalist civilization, in which Jews and Gentiles alike are involved. But in his disturbed mental condition he finds it easier to blame the failing upon Jews alone.

Quite as typical—and I am treating his letters for their scientific interest as psychopathic material—is another contradiction running through the documents. Again and again he blames the Jews for their alleged failure to assimilate. Even the half- and quarter-Jews, he declares, “adhere racially and religiously with Jewry.”

But in the same breath (and what a breath it is) he blames the Jews for “deliberately passing as Americans” and trying to merge themselves with their neighbors. “The Jew,” he writes, “insists that when he invades Italy or France