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!