Before leaving Soviet Russia, Dreiser dictated a statement summarizing what he had observed and learned on his journey (see p. 275). This statement, taken by Ruth Kennell, was released to the press. Kennell evidently kept a copy for herself; this version she published as an appendix to Theodore Dreiser and the Soviet Union (pp. 311— 15). The text below, with its headnote, appeared in the 6 February 1928 Chicago Daily News (pp. 1–2). It differs slightly from Kennell’s version: hers is addressed “to the Russian public,” for example, and uses “you” and “your” instead of “they” and “their” in the subsection entitled “Laws Cannot Make Men Clean.” The Kennell version also contains a few apparent typos, such as “places” for “spaces” in the second paragraph and “importance” for “impotence” in the second sentence of the subsection “Praises Actual Achievement.” Neither text is without flaw—the subheads in the newspaper version, for example, were surely added by desk editors —and both descend at equal remove from a lost typescript with (one assumes) carbon copies. Kennell’s text, however, is available in her book, so it has seemed more useful to reproduce here the Daily News text, which has not been reprinted since its original publication. The headnote gives a good picture of Dreiser on the eve of his departure from Russia.
Theodore Dreiser Finds Both Hope
and Failure in Russian Soviet Drama
Theodore Dreiser, the noted novelist, just before leaving Russia dictated his impressions of the country and its government. Junius B. Wood, The Daily News correspondent at Moscow, sends the statement and the following comment: “Though his optimism and penetrating philosophy were indomitable, Mr. Dreiser was far from comfortable physically, coughing with bronchitis and trying to keep warm under the blankets in a swayed backed bed of an unheated hotel on a bitterly cold Russian morning. To aid the heating he had pulled a fur cap over his ears, wrapped himself in his fur coat and even donned fur gloves and galoshes—a picturesque sage philosophizing to a muffled, blue-fingered stenographer. He had just completed an unusually rough six-day trip in a little steamer across the Black sea from Batum without losing appetite or spirits, only to meet an enforced wait of a week in Odessa because the Society for Cultural Relations with Abroad which sponsored his trip, had forgotten that a visa was necessary for one wishing to leave the country. The delay compelled him to forego his expected visit to Constantinople and to start for the United States. In addition to seeing factories, new residences, officials and the other stock exhibits of soviet Russia, Mr. Dreiser saw the actual life of the country as have few other visitors in such a short time. He whiffed the million odors of a Russian hotel bedroom hermetically sealed for the winter, rode a night in a “hard” car to Yasnaya Polanaya with peasants’ boots dangling around his ears and passed a night in the railroad station at Constantinovka because the officials said the train might come at any minute, but did not come in for twenty-four hours. An irascible policeman thumped any who dozed, some pampered Moscow bureaucrat having prohibited sleeping in the station. He waited another day amid the squalor and filth of the Baku station for another lost train, but saw sunshine through the gloom and hope for humanity in the soviet effort.”
BY THEODORE DREISER.
SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE
Of The Chicago Daily News Foreign Service. Copyright 1928. The Chicago Daily News, Inc.
Odessa, Ukraine, U. S. S. R., Jan. 13.— After a two months’ visit in soviet Russia I should like, before I leave for the United States, to give my first statement of my general impressions:
As a westerner, accustomed to the comparatively mild climate of the United States, I can only look upon Russia as a boreal world that would try any save those born of its very soil. Russians ought to be hardy because they survive so much that people of milder climes could not endure. To me, at times and in places, it seems to possess a kind of harsh beauty born of biting winds and vast spaces. That man should find it necessary to conquer it at all seems almost pitiful.
Yet dotted as it is with so huge a population, hitherto restrained by such untutored conditions, it seems not a little astounding that it should be the scene of the latest experiment in human government. Personally I am an individualist, and shall die one. In all this communistic welter I have seen nothing that dissuades me in the least from my earliest perceptions of the necessities of man. One of these is the individual dream of self-advancement, and I cannot feel that even here communism has altered that in the least. On the other hand, after the crushing weight of czardom and the unbridled capitalism that one sees in places, I can sympathize with the emotions of those who swung from oppression of the mass to their unlimited emancipation and authority.
Individual Comes First.
It is so plain that just now not the individual in general, but the individual in particular, as an artisan and little more, comes first. Everything is to be done for him; the intellectual — assuming that the laborer has the mentality so to do—is to be used by him as a servant of his mass needs.
Naturally, as an individualist this makes me smile, for I see only the most individualistic political leaders of Europe trying to guide him to an understanding of what this means. That even now he grasps or fully believes it, I doubt. More likely it is the shimmering array of material benefits dangled before him that interests and enthralls him and what he actually believes is that great and powerful individuals are now kind enough to aid him in his struggle for a better life. And he is grateful to them for that. And so am I.
But that the right of the superior brain to the superior directing and ruling positions has been done away with I question. Really I do not believe it. In Russia as elsewhere I am sure you will find the sly and the self-interested as well as the kind and the wise slipping into the positions of authority, executing for the rank and file the necessary program which guarantees their comfort. And as time goes on, if not now, with a much larger return for their services. It is a survival which I for one am sure will never be completely abrogated.
Praises Actual Achievement.
Now as for what this superior group of idealists have done for Russia so far I have only praise. For one thing, and to my immense delight, they have swept dogmatic and brain-stultifying religion from its position of authority and cast it into the background of impotence where it belongs. Furthermore, they have given to the collective mentality of Russia freedom to expand, and while perhaps this expansion is a little too much colored by the new dogmas of communism, I do not really object, for exact communism is not by any means in force here now and I doubt if it will be much so in the future. For unless I miss my guess, the Russian mind is at bottom a realistic mind and it will see life for what it is—a struggle not to be too much handicapped by the incurably incompetent any more than it is to be too dogmatically ruled by the self-seeking and indifferent materialist.
I am pleased by the enormous housing program and the material evidence of its fulfillment in every part of the Union. It is wonderful to see the new factories, the new schools, hospitals, clubs and scientific institutions which are now already dotting the land.
I sincerely hope that this vast enthusiasm for the modernization of Russia and the introduction of western facilities of every kind will not slacken until the land is the paradise which this most amazing group of idealists wish it to be. It certainly is a land that needs and deserves a brighter day and a gayer spirit. And I, for one, would do nothing anywhere to counteract the fulfillment of this program.
Pleads for Homeless Children.
On the other hand, there are certain obvious defects in either the Russian temperament or the fulfillment of this program, or both, which I think should be attended to now. One of these is the immediate care of the thousands of homeless children whom one encounters in every part of Russia. It is useless to say, as many do, that the government as yet lacks either the means or the facilities for their assumption and care. The trade unions, I notice, do not lack means for their new homes and their new clubs, and new theaters. But they had better suspend action on some of these material comforts for themselves until they have done the needful thing for these children, and it is a shame and an outrage, a commentary on the Russian temperament itself, too dark to be endured for one minute if the nation has that dignity and self-respect which it so consistently claims.
Another thing that strikes me as not only irritating but discreditable is the national indifference to proper sanitation. One hears so much of what is to be in the future, but there is so much that could be done right now with little more than the will of the people to be cleaner than they are. The Russian house, the Russian yard, the Russian street, the Russian toilet, the Russian hotel, the individual Russian’s attitude toward his own personal appearance, are items which convey to the westerner (and particularly to a traveler from America) a sense of something neither creditable nor wholesome, and which cannot possibly be excused on the ground of poverty. There are as many poor people in Holland, Germany, France and England as there are in Russia, but you would never find them tolerating the conditions which in Russia seem to be accepted as a matter of course.
Laws Cannot Make Men Clean.
Cleanliness is not a matter of national law or fiat, or even prosperity, public or private, but of the very essence of the individual himself. Either he loves and responds to cleanliness or he does not. If he does, he will make untold sacrifices to keep himself free of disorder and filth; if he does not, no law this side of a bayonet will aid him. And it seems to me that the Russians whom I have seen, from the Baltic to the Caspian, are far more indifferent to the first essentials of sanitation than any of the more progressive nations of whom they now claim to be one. It will not do, as some insist, to say that all this is a matter of prosperity and equipment; it is not, I insist it is not. And unless the international slur in regard to this is to remain, the Russian, individually and not nationally, will have to bestir himself and purify as well as decorate his immediate physical surroundings.
Their hotels, trains, railway stations and restaurants are too dirty and too poorly equipped. They do not wash their windows often enough. They do not let in enough air. They either overheat or underheat the chambers which they occupy. They live too many in one room and are even lunatic enough to identify it with a communistic spirit. I rise to complain. And I suggest in this conection that more individualism and less communism would be to the great advantage of this mighty country.
Sees Need of Efficiency.
Now as to the future of this great program I think that it will succeed providing, first, that the program which the government now has of introducing the latest labor-saving devices in every phase of the national life is fulfilled, and second, that the discrepancy between the cost of manufacture and the wages of the worker is bridged. For as I see it, as yet there is too much effort to make the laborer comfortable and too little to make him thoroughly efficient. Really there should be no talk of the seven-hour-day until the workers are earning enough to pay for the latest type of machinery which would make such a day possible.
In the next place, one of the staggering problems which confronts this government is that of the peasant and the land— 120,000,000 peasants, the enlightening of whom in regard to modern agricultural methods is still incipient. It is true that there are a large number of what in America would be known as agricultural stations, with all the latest information and machinery in regard to farming and stock-raising. But it is one thing to take this information to the peasant and another to make him accept it.
Mostly, unless I am maliciously informed, the peasant desires nothing so much as to be let alone, to be allowed to go along in the way he had hitherto gone. The problem of interesting him has barely been touched and I see that his indifference is one of the severest trials.
Make Farming an Industry.
Now my solution would be for the government to divide the land into departments and according to its peculiar possibilities; that it place at the head of each department an agriculturist or board of agriculturists whose business would be to develop it quite as any commercial or financial prospect anywhere would be developed. The government should provide machinery and whatever other equipment might be necessary and then employ farmers, quite as a factory employs hands. They should be organized in unions, paid so much a day, limited to so many hours of work and allowed to look after their own welfare quite as trade unionists now look after theirs. By this method their efficiency might be standardized; farm schools could be operated at the source of the crop supply.
The literature, the equipment and the practical methods would all be at the door of the farmer-unionist, and by that method the entire possibilities of the enormous agricultural area of Russia be brought into full force. If this could be done, most certainly Russia would leap into the forefront of nations, economically stable and powerful. Also, she would be the first to solve this disconcerting and depressing problem which now faces every nation, capitalists or otherwise, the world over.
In spite of many difficulties connected with this trip, I have appreciated the opportunity given me by the soviet government of witnessing the details of this great experiment and I have only kindest thoughts of and the best wishes for its eventual success.