Ohio History Journal

GREGORY L. CRIDER

 

William Dean Howells and

the Gilded Age: Socialist

in a Fur-lined Overcoat

 

 

William Dean Howells was among the foremost of several late-

nineteenth century novelists, including Mark Twain and Hamlin Garland,

who left small midwestern towns to seek their literary fortunes in the East.

Esteemed as a first-rank novelist, the "Father of American Realism," and

the nation's most prominent literary critic, he became a celebrated symbol

of Gilded Age culture. When four hundred guests attended the testimonial

dinner in New York tendered by Harper's magazine on his seventy-fifth

birthday in 1912, the New York Times hailed it as "such a gathering of

distinguished men . . . as few occasions in the past have called together in

this city."¹ Guests included such unlikely bedfellows as Ida Tarbell and

Albert Beveridge, Ray Stannard Baker and Admiral Alfred Thayer

Mahan, and President William H. Taft. Yet while Howells grew quite

comfortable in his position and prided himself upon his climb from lowly

origins, many of his biographers have noted that he later developed grave

reservations about the socioeconomic system which made his rise possible.

Howells expressed these reservations in his economic novels and became

an avowed socialist. But his socialism always remained circumscribed by

his hard-earned prosperity. While he wrote his friend Henry James that "I

should hardly like to trust pen and ink with all the audacity of my social

ideas," he went on to confess that "Meantime, I wear a fur-lined overcoat,

and live in all the luxury my money can buy."²

 

 

 

Gregory L. Crider, a Professor of History and American Studies, is presently enrolled at

the Indiana University Law School.

 

 

 

1. New York Times, March 3, 1912.

2. W. D. Howells to Henry James, Jr., October 10, 1888, Howells MSS, Houghton

Library, Harvard University. This and subsequent correspondence found in the Houghton

Library are used by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Permission

to cite the letter is given by W. W. Howell of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and

Ethnology, Harvard University; any further publication of the letter requires new permission.

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William Dean Howells                                          409

 

Howells was born in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, the son of an unemployed

printer who worked at carpentry and other odd jobs. After suffering

through ill-fated newspaper ventures in Hamilton and Dayton, the family

finally settled in Jefferson, where Howells senior became editor of the

Ashtabula Sentinel. Later, as a successful novelist, Howells would

frequently recall his long arduous hours as a typesetter for his father. Yet

while the print-shop confined the youthful Howells to a procession of

midwestern villages, its reliance upon a steady flow of literary material

from the East opened an exciting new world to him, encouraging him to

develop his own writing talents. After enjoying some success with his early

poems and short stories, Howells, at the age of twenty-one, was appointed

city editor of the Ohio State Journal in Columbus. Situated in the Ohio

capital, he felt his literary prospects to have been raised immeasurably,

happily writing to his sister Victoria that "I can sell, now, just as much as I

will write."³ He also relished the expansive social life of the state capital and

participated to the extent his modest income allowed, living "with the

splendor of a lord and the generosity of a vagabond."⁴ In 1860, he made a

literary pilgrimmage to New England and New York, obtaining personal

audiences with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry

David Thoreau, James T. Fields, and James Russell Lowell.

His horizons broadened immensely by his visit East, Howells quickly

grew restless in Columbus. When the Civil War broke out, he secured the

consulship to Venice as a reward for a campaign biography of Lincoln.

Here he continued to write and gather literary material until his return in

1865. Once back in the United States, he was briefly employed with E. L.

Godkin's Nation in New York before his friendship with James Fields, the

editor of the Atlantic Monthly, won him the assistant editorship of that

magazine in 1866. In 1871, after five years of distinguished service, he

replaced Fields as editor, a position he held for the next decade. Over the

next several years, he earned a reputation as the nation's foremost literary

critic and launched his own prolific writing career. By 1885, he could boast

of thirteen novels, numerous plays, short stories, poems and articles.

Rising from village printer's apprentice to first-rank literary critic and

novelist before the age of fifty, Howells could indeed be satisfied with his

accomplishments. No wonder that he should wholeheartedly endorse the

"rags-to-riches" myth which rose to prominence in the Gilded Age. Like his

abolitionist father, Howells had always stood solidly behind the Whig and

later the Republican party, writing flattering biographies of both Abraham

Lincoln and Rutherford B. Hayes. When the GOP became the party of

prosperity after the war, it endorsed a laissezfaire economic policy, and the

 

3. W. D. Howells to Victoria M. Howells, January 2, 1859, Howells MSS, Harvard.

4. W. D. Howells to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., February 24, 1861, Howells MSS,

Harvard.

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410                                                   OHIO HISTORY

 

author maintained his enthusiastic support. As one scholar has noted,

"Although in the 1850s Howells had publicized the Republican party as the

bastion of those who defied the Fugitive Slave Law he now stood with the

forces of respectability, decorum, and lawful process."⁵ Howells became a

staunch defender of the unimpaired capitalist system which presented him

the opportunity to build his fortune, arguing that public assistance

encouraged idleness and penalized those who earned their own way.

Echoing the popular sentiment that strikes gave laborers an unfair

advantage in an otherwise free-working system, he supported management

in nearly every labor disturbance prior to the mid-1880s. In an essay in the

Nation in 1866 he scoffed at recent socialist arguments, pointing out the

virtues of a society in which individuals determined their own futures and

citing the "rags-to-riches" careers of Lincoln and Andrew Johnson.⁶ One

year later, his Venetian Life referred to the "interesting squalor and

picturesque wretchedness" of the city's pervasive poverty.⁷ Howells'

political and social philosophy was that of a man who had pulled himself

up by his bootstraps and could see no reason why others should not do the

same.

Although the author subscribed to this philosophy for nearly twenty

years after the Civil War, his faith began to receive a series of jolts in the late

seventies. Alarmed by the widespread violence and economic paralysis

which accompanied the Great Railway Strike of 1877, and influenced by

the increasingly strident pleas of farmers and urban laborers, he began to

devote more of the Atlantic Monthly's pages to social and economic issues.

His first novel to seriously question the capitalistic ethic was The Rise of

Silas Lapham, published in 1885. In it Howells seemed to express doubts

about his own comfortable Boston niche in criticizing the effect of the

business ethic on society and the type of men it produced. Lapham was a

self-made tycoon who, like Howells, was in the midst of building a

magnificent home on Boston's Back Bay. But his financial rise was based

upon ruthless business dealings. Lapham repudiated his previous business

ethic and achieved moral salvation, but at the cost of his personal fortune.

While Howells was not yet ready to renounce his own fortune, his criticism

of capitalism was sincere and deepened over the next several years.

Howells' career as a socialist has been well-documented. The same year

Silas Lapham was published, he was persuaded by the Christian teachings

of Leo Tolstoy, which he quickly came to see as America's last, best hope.

An outpouring of public and private writings over the next several years

established him as a prominent socialist spokesman. The most important

 

5. Louis J. Budd, "Howells, the Atlantic Monthly, and Republicanism," American

Literature, 24 (May, 1952), 144.

6. "Minor Topics," Nation, 2 (March 1, 1866), 261.

7. W. D. Howells, Venetian Life (New York, 1897), 33.

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William Dean Howells                                         411

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412                                                     OHIO HISTORY

 

was A Hazard of New Fortunes, a novel which the author wrote in his

outrage at the trial and executions of the Haymarket anarchists in 1886.

The book's twin themes were the pervasive inequality of wealth, expressed

in the radical socialist critique of the beleaguered German immigrant,

Lindau, and the debilitating effect of capitalism on the wealthy capitalist,

which underlay the experiences of the financial tycoon, Jacob Dryfoos.

Two subsequent novels, The World of Chance and A Traveler from

Altruria, brought even more violent attacks upon New York City's

economic injustices. As its title suggests, the former's theme was that

random and uncontrollable chance is the central feature of capitalistic

competition. "The political economists talk about the laws of business,"

observed one character, "but there are no laws of business. There is nothing

but chances, and no amount of wisdom can forecast or control them"⁸ A

Traveler from Altruria was the forum for a thorough condemnation of the

American economic system by a visitor from an imaginery socialist utopia.

Yet even while publishing his most ascerbic novels, Howells' socialist

commitment was an uneasy one. Persistently challenging the exploitation

of the poor and the hollow myths used to justify it, the author untiringly

continued to augment his personal fortune. Between 1889 and 1897, the

peak years of his social criticism, Howells recorded a series of financial

statements which indicate rapidly mounting assets. Despite rising

expenses, his fortune increased by nearly two-thirds, from $57,450 in 1889

to $93,989 in 1897.⁹ His real income in these years was comparable to a man

earning well over $150,000 per year today. At his death in 1920, the author

left an estate valued at between $165,000 and $200,000.10 From the time of

his arrival in Boston, the kind of life Howells chose was expensive, if not

extravagant. He traveled to Europe frequently and enjoyed the finest

distillations and vintages. The Howells attended dinner parties and other

social occasions nearly every evening, and the author preferred nothing

more than to relax over a fine cigar in the company of Boston's

distinguished Dante Club. He purchased a series of increasingly expensive

residences in Cambridge and Boston, finally building a magnificent home

at 303 Beacon Street, in the heart of Boston's most exclusive residential

district. Soon thereafter he moved to New York, spending his mature years

vacillating between luxurious urban apartments and a series of summer

resorts.

 

 

8. W. D. Howells, The World of Chance (New York, 1893), 76.

9. W. D. Howells to John Howells, June 15, 1889; July 5, 1892, A.d.s., Harvard, "My

Affairs"; May 25, 1894, A.d.s., Harvard, "My Affairs"; July 1, 1897, A.d.s., Harvard, "My

Affairs," all in Howells MSS, Harvard.

10. Everett Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism (New York, 1950), 50, estimated

Howells' estate at nearly $200,000. Robert Walts in "William Dean Howells and the House of

Harper," unpublished doctoral dissertation, (Rutgers University, 1954), 266, valued it at

$165,000.

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William Dean Howells                                            413

 

Howells' literary production was influenced by these tastes. He

negotiated doggedly to secure handsome salaries from journals such as the

Atlantic, Harper's, and Cosmopolitan, and the best royalty arrangements

with his book publishers, and he repeatedly suggested new editions, book

designs, saleable topics and themes. 11 One of the era's most prolific authors,

he frequently put together second-rate novels to meet deadlines or satisfy

his reading audience. Through the Eye of a Needle, the utopian sequel to A

Traveler from Altruria, his most radical novel, resulted not so much from

conviction as consideration of finance. "There is now a revival of interest in

such speculations," he wrote his brother, "and the publishers think the

book [here he was speaking of the previously serialized Letters of an

Altrurian Traveler], with an interesting sequel . . . will succeed. I hope

so.^"12 Despite a fascination with the theater, it was the promise of financial

reward which encouraged him to write plays.¹³

Howells' prosperity also affected the content of his writings. Although

concerned for the worker, farmer, even the immigrant, he carefully

insulated himself from their plights, and thus was unable to write

convincingly about them. Even his critical economic novels were confined

to middle- and upper-class characters, through whose eyes he observed the

poor; in their discussions he assessed the consequences of poverty. Silas

Lapham's brief visit to his office girl Zerrilla's slum dwelling, a passing

glimpse of the Ponkwasset mills in Annie Kilburn, Lemuel Barker's

education into Boston's seamy side in The Minister's Charge, the Marches'

ironic observations in their ramblings through New York's tenement rows

in A Hazard of New Fortunes-these were as close to the sufferings of the

poor as Howells ever got.

In contrast, most of his editorial stories and essays written at the same

time as his economic novels were light, witty, often satirical, and usually

portrayed the poor as quaint or picturesque. In "Wild Flowers of the

Asphalt," an essay from his book Literature and Life, the narrator sounded

more like a native charity worker than socialist reformer. It was

unfortunate that a variety of flowers could not grow naturally from New

York streets and buildings, he noted, so deprived children might appreciate

their beauty. "I shall not mind their plucking my Barmecide blossoms, and

carrying them home by the armfuls," the narrator mused. "When good-will

costs nothing we ought to practise it even with the tramps, and these are

very welcome, in their wanderings over the city pave, to rest their weary

limbs in any of my pleached bowers they come to."¹⁴ In "Worries of a

11. By the 1890s Howells commanded royalties exceeded only by those of his friend Mark

Twain.

12. W D. Howells to Joseph Howells, February 24, 1907, Howells MSS, Harvard.

13. Walter J. Meserve, ed., Introduction, The Complete Plays of W. D. Howells (New

York, 1960), xxiv.

14. W. D. Howells, "Wild Flowers of the Asphalt," Literature and Life (New York, 1902),

94.

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414                                                   OHIO HISTORY

 

Winter Walk" the narrator encountered a little girl with a bucket, then two

old women with aprons, gathering lumps of coal which dropped from a

wagon passing down their tenement street. The scene turned his

speculations toward how the trio might be fictionalized into a pretty girl

who would evoke sympathy and later romantic interest from the

compassionate wagon driver.¹⁵ It was their picturesqueness, not their

poverty, which drew the author's interest.

With revealing clarity, Howells portrayed the plight of New York City's

poor in another selection from Literature and Life entitled "The Midnight

Platoon." Here he alluded to his friend's "great piece of luck" in having "the

pleasure of seeing" a tenement bread-line one winter midnight.16 "In a

coupe" and "wrapped to the chin in a long fur overcoat," the friend bade his

driver to pause as he watched in fascination. After noting that none of the

actors wore an overcoat, "He made his reflection that if any of them were

imposters, and not true men, with real hunger, and if they were alone to feel

the stiff, wholesome, Christmas-week cold, they were justly punished for

their deceit."¹⁷ Throughout the essay, Howells seemed to mock the kind of

insulated complacency which he himself had been unable to escape. Two

emotions appeared to exist in uneasy balance: a sense of being apart from

the suffering of others, and yet somehow responsibility for it. This tension

was poignantly expressed in the concluding passage:

My friend did not quite like to think. Vague, reproachful thoughts for all the remote

and immediate luxury of his life passed through his mind. If he reformed that and

gave the saving to hunger and cold? But what was the use? There was so much

hunger, so much cold, that it could not go round.

His action caught the notice of the slaves, and as the coupe passed them they

all turned and faced it, like soldiers under review making ready to salute a

superior. ..

My friend was suddenly aware of a certain quality of representivity; he stood to

these men for all the ease and safety that they could never, never hope to know. He

was Society: Society that was to be preserved because it embodies Civilization. He

wondered if they hated him in his capacity of Better Classes.18

 

In "Police Report," an essay in Impressions and Experiences, Howells

resumed his mood of amused detachment as he recorded the proceedings of

a Boston police court. Though the scene was "not pleasant to the eye," and

he was compelled to endure the "really deplorable smell" and the "sinister

or vacant expression" on the faces of the courtroom figures, he soon came

to enjoy the human interest in watching a procession of defendants pass by.

"The features of the performance followed one another rapidly, as at a

 

15. "Worries of a Winter Walk," Ibid., 36-49.

16. "The Midnight Platoon," Ibid., 154.

17. Ibid., 158.

18. Ibid., 159-60.

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William Dean Howells                                           415

 

variety theater, without any disagreeable waits or the drop of a curtain,"

and he was particularly amused by "a laughable little interlude of Habitual

Drunkenness."¹⁹ Even his fictional Altrurian could experience such

complacency. In "An East-side Ramble," also from Impressions and

Experiences, the visitor passed through New York's deplorable Irish and

Jewish slums and attempted to convince himself that the inhabitants were

not as destitute as they seemed. "I soon came to look upon the conditions as

normal," he observed, "not for me, indeed, or for the kind of people I

mostly consort with, but for the inmates of the dens and lairs about me."²⁰

The inconsistency of Howell's socialist commitment is apparent in his

condemnation of the stock exchange. Market speculation, he contended in

A Modern Instance, Silas Lapham, and A Hazard of New Fortunes, was

strictly a game of chance. These profits were not "earned," and when

acquired in large amounts worked insidiously upon the investor. Such was

the case of millionaire speculator Jacob Dryfoos in a A Hazard of New

Fortunes:

His moral decay began with his perception of the opportunity of making money

quickly and abundantly, which offered itself to him when he sold his farm . . . the

money he had already made without effort and without merit bred its unholy self-

love in him; he began to honor money, especially money that had been won

suddenly and in large sums; for money that had been earned painfully, slowly, and

in little amounts he had only pity and contempt.²¹

 

Yet such attacks did not preclude the author's own speculations. Ironically,

his initial $10,000 investment in Atchison, Topeka, and Sante Fe railroad

securities dwindled to $2880 in 1897. When it suffered a steep decline in

1890, he turned again to his socialist solution of nationalizing the railroads.

Indignantly he wrote his father that, "It was honest money, that I had

earned, not made; but perhaps I had no right to have money in stocks."²²

Yet when he finally sold his stock, it was to invest an equivalent sum in the

Pittsburgh, Bessemer, and Lake Erie railroad.

The author displayed a similar inconsistency in his treatment of his

chosen symbol of American capitalist exploitation-the millionaire. "How

much money can a man earn without wronging or oppressing some other

man?" asked the German anarchist Lindau in Hazard. Another of the

novel's characters, Jacob Dryfoos, ruthlessly exploiting workmen at his

natural gas wells in Moffit, Indiana, provided an answer to the question.

Yet Howells later wrote Charles Eliot Norton that "the pleasantest affair

[he had] been at in New York" was a dinner given by Andrew Carnegie in

19. W. D. Howells, "Police Report," Impressions and Experiences (New York, 1896), 54.

20. "An East-side Ramble," Ibid., 138-9.

21. W. D. Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (New York, 1890), 226.

22. W. D. Howells, to William Cooper Howells, November 16, 1890, Howells MSS,

Harvard.

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416                                                     OHIO HISTORY

 

March 1903 at "his great new palace on Fifth Avenue.^"23 He thoroughly

enjoyed the "wonderful dinner" at Carnegie's home and tour of "the lower

floor of the house, which occupies half a block, and has a grove of trees

round it which were transplanted full grown."²⁴ What was the socialist

author-critic's opinion of the steel baron whose Pinkerton-led forces had

outraged the author a decade earlier by battling strikers at the Homestead

works? "I believe he is a sincerely good man, with the wish to help all he

can."²⁵ Howells and Carnegie became good friends following the author's

evening at the "Carnegiery," meeting socially on several occasions in New

York and abroad. Try as he might to heed Lindau's warning to "remember

the poor," Howells was a helpless disciple of the worldly pleasures "which

others pretend are so vapid."

Such a stark contrast between fiction and lifestyle, however, ignores the

author's genuine sympathy for his fellow man and personal anguish over

his own contradictory behavior. Howells might have been describing him-

self in a letter to his brother Joe in 1906 which regretted the effect of great

wealth on his friend Carnegie. "He is rather pathetic to me," Howells ob-

served, "for he is like the young man who had great possessions, and he is

always going away exceedingly sorrowful-But really, so long as the

competitive conditions endure, sorrowfulness like his must continue."²⁶

The author's references to his hapless brother Sam reflect his own sorrow

over great possessions. In his later years H owells was regularly beset by his

unfortunate brother for financial assistance or aid in securing employment.

In 1902 he wrote his sister Aurelia after Sam's latest plea for help. "The

drawback is the feeling of selfishness that I have in enjoying all this while so

many cannot," he lamented. "Really, the misery of the world seems to take

an unfair advantage of prosperity. Just now Sam's sorrows have me by the

throat. He is in a way to lose all he has put into his house, and he cannot

hope to pay for it."²⁷ Fifteen years later, as he wrote his sister Annie, the

penitence continued:

I hear from Sam when he is in need, and that keeps us fair correspondents. Now and

then my conscience gets a lick on me for living better than he does, and then I send

him something without his asking. .. . Both his girls live upon him and me. I

deserve it, but I don't think he does.²⁸

 

Throughout his later years Howells became almost painfully aware of

the contradictions which marked his life. As early as 1878 he had confessed

to his father that "My own life has been too much given to the merely

 

23. W. D. Howells to Charles Eliot Norton, April 6, 1903, Howells MSS, Harvard.

24. W. D. Howells to Aurelia M. Howells, March 29, 1903, Howells MSS, Harvard.

25. W. D. Howells to Joseph Howells, November 25, 1906, Howells MSS, Harvard.

26. Ibid.

27. W. D. Howells to Aurelia M. Howells, July 22, 1902, Howells MSS, Harvard.

28. W. D. Howells to Annie Howells, August 21, 1917, Howells MSS, Harvard.

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William Dean Howells                                                417

 

artistic and to wordly ambition."²⁹ Ten years later, after praising Edward

Everett Hale for trying to reform the economic system, he admitted that

I am neither an example nor an incentive, meanwhile in my own way of living; I am

a creature of the past; only I do believe that I see the light of the future, and that it is

this which shows me my ugliness and fatuity and feebleness. Words, words,

words! How to make them things, deeds-you have the secret of that; with me they

only breed more words.³⁰

 

To Hamlin Garland he confessed that "I am reading and thinking about

questions that carry beyond myself and my miserable literary idolatries of

the past. . . . I am still the slave of selfishness, but I am no longer content

to be so."³¹ Apparently Howells was able to find a modicum of contentment

over the next two years, which he expressed to his father in a letter written

in 1890:

I stopped to see Mark Twain at Hartford . . . He and his wife and Elinor and I are

all of accord in our way of thinking: that is, we are theoretical socialists, and

practical aristocrats. But it is a comfort to be right theoretically, and to be ashamed

of one's self practically.³²

 

William Dean Howells, then, was both strident critic and successful

product of the Gilded Age. Lifting himself from obscurity in a small

midwestern village, he rose to prominence as the nation's foremost literary

critic and one of its leading novelists. In this rise he realized and was himself

inspired by the "rags-to-riches" rhetoric which marked the era's prosperity.

Although initially exultant in his success and anxious to enjoy its

accouterments, he came to abhor a system which would provide

handsomely for a few while callously exploiting those least equipped to

provide for themselves. His favorite targets were the robber barons, to him

the symbols of the capitalist order, whose fortunes, he felt, could only be

built upon other men's miseries. In the end, however, he could not escape

the contradictions of his own prosperous circumstances. Like his close

friend Twain and so many of his other literary acquaintances, including

Theodore Dreiser and Hamlin Garland, sympathy for the downtrodden

coexisted with the lure of personal wealth. Like these other Gilded Age

authors, he resigned himself to an uneasy compromise. He would be both

 

 

 

 

29. W. D. Howells to William Cooper Howells, July 21, 1878, Howells MSS, Harvard.

30. W. D. Howells to Edward Everett Hale, October 28, 1888, Smith College Library. The

author wishes to thank W. W. Howells of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and

Ethnology, Harvard University, for his kind permission to cite from both this letter and the

one cited in footnote 31; any further publication of the letters requires new permission.

31. W. D. Howells to Hamlin Garland, January 15, 1888,The Hamlin Garland Collection,

University of Southern California Library.

32. W. D. Howells to William Cooper Howells, February 2, 1890, Howells MSS, Harvard.

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418                                                  OHIO HISTORY

 

"theoretical socialist" and "practical aristocrat." Criticizing the injustices

of the nation's economic system until his last days, he would continue to

wear his "fur-lined overcoat."

• 11