Commemorative Impulses in the “Heart of America”: Kansas City, the Great War, and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy

Abstract

Every story is a travel story—a spatial practice.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984)

the old idea I had years ago for a national mausoleum a thousand feet high to be built in the centre of the U.S. . . . on a flat plain ten miles square. Four diagonal ‘Avenues of the States’ to approach it, lined or studded with steles (a la Washington Monument), 800 feet high. The mausoleum itself to be absolutely square, 1000 feet each way and 1000 feet high. The centre to contain pyramidal platforms for the tombs of the great dead, each platform a class or order. The floor space to be devoted to special tombs. The walls to memorial tablets. No one to be buried permanently until after 100 years have passed. Temporary entombments by order of act of Congress. An electric pipe organ distributed so that sounds are equalized to all parts of mausoleum at once. Music in this hall never to cease until nation ceases.

  Theodore Dreiser, American Diaries: 1902-1926 (1982), 24 Dec. 1917

On 1 November 1921, four years after Theodore Dreiser envisioned this midwestern architectural absurdity, Missouri Governor Arthur M. Hyde addressed a crowd of over 100,000 people gathered in front of Union Station for the site dedication of the Liberty Memorial to the 441 Kansas Citians who fell in the Great War. In addition to local residents, the governor’s audience included thousands of veterans from across the country who were attending the American Legion’s third annual national convention. Also present were Vice President Calvin Coolidge, along with the Missouri-born General John J. Pershing and his French, British, Italian, and Belgian counterparts—the first such gathering of Allied commanders in history. Those gathered looked upon a temporary stele erected on the site, which carried the name “Liberty Memorial,” an image of which appeared in local newspapers across the country (Figure 1). The extensive media coverage solidified the city’s nationwide associations. As this unprecedented international celebration of a local memorial concluded, many of the keynote speakers departed Kansas City for Washington, DC, where the nation’s unknown soldier was buried ten days later in Arlington National Cemetery. Designed as a US equivalent of the French and British unknown warrior graves placed a year earlier beneath the Arc de Triomphe and Westminster Abbey, respectively, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier promised to become the site of national memory and mourning. In the years that followed, the nation’s leaders did indeed embrace Arlington as an important locus for annual Memorial and Armistice Day celebrations. Kansas City’s Liberty Memorial, however, continued to draw widespread attention, even rivaling the Capital as an epicenter of national First World War commemorative efforts.¹

Fig. 1.

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The Daily Argus, White Plains, New York, Thursday, 10 November 1921, p. 11. Source: newspapers.com.

Kansas City garnered further attention when, just two years later, it hosted the national convention of American War Mothers in October 1923. And three years after that, upon the memorial’s unveiling in 1926, now-President Coolidge returned to address an even larger crowd to place the “official sanction of the national government” upon the completed landscape, which he described as “one of the most elaborate and impressive memorials that adorn our country” (qtd. in Donovan 77). For Governor Hyde, the President’s words only affirmed those suspicions about the future national importance of Kansas City and its memorial that he had expressed upon introducing Coolidge to the crowd five years earlier: “The memorial is here dedicated by Kansas City,” the governor declared, “but it belongs to the American nation” (“Flame Alight” 1).

To Kansas Citians, the dedication of the Liberty Memorial was part of the city’s broader effort to establish itself as a national destination for business and tourism, which local boosters described as the “Heart of America.” Located in the nation’s seventh largest state, whose electoral clout then proved greater than that of California and Michigan and rendered it a “true bellwether” of early twentieth-century politics (Pasley 35), Kansas City was well positioned in the early 1920s to assume this prominence. Under the leadership of Thomas J. Pendergast, the city’s Democratic political machine, known as “little Tammany Hall,” shaped both state and national party agendas. Additionally, Kansas City had become a premier cattle market by the end of the Great War, with over 230 acres of stockyards employing more than 70% of the city’s manufacturing labor force and earning profits in the millions (Herron 120). Such revenue contributed, in part, to the local “City Beautiful” movement, which had produced the iconic Union Station (1914) that received the Liberty Memorial’s thousands of guests, J. C. Nichols’s renowned Country Club Plaza (1923), and the dozens of grand fountains that spread across the city amid Nichols’s unique landscape designs.² While the sincerity of the Liberty Memorial Association’s commemorative focus was unquestionable, the site was, local business leaders hoped, yet another attraction that would help raise the city’s national profile. The widespread interest in the memorial’s development suggested that these hopes had been fulfilled, and, by the mid-1920s, few questioned Kansas City’s visibility.

No less certain was the city’s cultural importance. Across the interwar years, Kansas City inspired the work of cultural icons such as painter Thomas Hart Benton and, later, jazz musician Charlie Parker. Influenced by the city’s location at the intersection of North-South and East-West cultural tensions, these artists produced unique regional works that, like the Liberty Memorial, resonated for the whole nation (Adams 277). Also drawn to the city was Dreiser, a native Midwesterner from Terre Haute, Indiana, whose monumental three-part novel, An American Tragedy (1925), opens with a full depiction of Kansas City in characteristically extensive detail. The street-preaching Griffiths family, including protagonist Clyde, whom we first meet as a 12-year-old boy, lives in a rundown mission home “situated in that part of Kansas City which lies north of Independence Boulevard and west of Troost Avenue” (Dreiser 11).

Given the importance of Kansas City in US commemorative discourse, the setting of Book One of An American Tragedy is striking. Yet Dreiser’s representation of it as a dynamic, material cityscape has long been overshadowed by critical focus on Books Two and Three, especially the sensational true-crime aspects of the original 1906 murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette upon which Dreiser based his plot.³ Approaching the novel’s Kansas City setting through a spatial lens, however, resituates the narrative within the nation’s commemorative culture and reveals its antimemorial qualities. In this way, Dreiser’s work echoes other interwar publications such as Laurence Stallings’s Plumes (1924), May Miller’s Stragglers in the Dust (1930), and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934), each of which critiques postwar commemorative culture by way of representations of physical memorials and direct references to the war. Ironically, An American Tragedy achieves similar ends by eliding references to the war and its memorial aftermath and presenting instead a narrative set in Kansas City, the postwar commemorative center of the US. To borrow from Andrew M. Shanken's The Everyday Life of Memorials (2022), Dreiser effectively “turns off” (18) the city’s famous memorial landscape. Yet, even as he explicitly excludes it, his characters nevertheless emblematize so many in the war generation who, after 1918, never enjoyed the glory and honor promised by popular commemorative discourses in the era. In this paradoxical way, the Great War, long dismissed by scholars of Dreiser’s novel as missing in action, achieves its presence from the novel’s very opening.

Hence, an examination of Dreiser’s Kansas City as Kansas City reveals an extended ironic commentary on postwar commemorative impulses that foregrounded unity, glory, and victory in the very midst of an era marked by unrest, grief, and violence. As Donald Pizer has established, irony lies at the heart of Dreiser’s narrative approach: “[T]hough Dreiser seldom engages in verbal irony, he habitually relies in his fiction on an intricately interwoven series of narrative or structural ironies” (26–27). Despite never mentioning the war or its aftermath directly, the novel nevertheless indirectly meditates upon three topics that resounded in the mid-1920s US: commemorative spaces, commemorative silences, and commemorative inequities. Recognizing the importance of the novel’s inaugural setting, not to mention Dreiser’s own exhaustive approach to naturalist portrayal, we argue for the significance of Kansas City in Dreiser’s work, especially as it links his perhaps most enduring novel to US practices and patterns of World War I memory making. First, this counterintuitive claim rests upon our close reading of An American Tragedy, derived from our tours of the city with the novel and early-century maps in hand;⁴ second, our claim emerges from various additional period sources, including automobile guidebooks, local newspapers, commemorative programs, and physical memorials.

In doing so, we are inspired by spatial humanities scholars like Robert Tally, who defines topophrenia as the “constant and uneasy ‘placemindedness’ that characterizes a subject’s interactions with his or her environment” (1). Building on the spatial theorizing of Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1974) and Edward W. Soja’s Thirdspace (1996), Tally reminds us of the connections readers often draw between texts and lived spaces as they “fit narratives or spatial representations into some sort of spatiotemporal context in which they . . . give meaningful shape to the world” (32). In our spatial reading, we apply Soja’s trialectic of “real,” “imagined,” and “real-and-imagined” dimensions (6), thereby viewing interactions between both a literal or “real” Kansas City—as a lived, physical space, and an “imagined” place—and the host of images, associations, discourses, and fictional representations existing in readers’ minds and derived from their own knowledge. For the true import of An American Tragedy comprises the “real-and-imagined” dimension that bridges “physical and mental spaces” or what Tally describes as “the ‘real’ geography out there and the representations of space we carry in our minds” (3). As Franco Moretti writes, “what happens depends a lot on where it happens” (70).

Although the war and its aftermath might seem absent from the Kansas City Dreiser conjures, the novel presents a tragic series of linked figures who, in the commemorative heart of America, ironically evoke real postwar experiences: a young man whose life is destroyed after his involvement in the taking of human lives, mothers mourning the losses of their children, and veterans whose postwar lives of hardship and violence fall far short of memorial ideals. Our combined analysis, then, of the “real” Kansas City—and its commemorative landmarks—and the one Dreiser “imagined”—and its anticommemorative narratives—yields a “real-and-imagined” view of the novel in its historical context. As Andrew Thacker observes, “Literary texts represent social spaces but social space shapes literary forms” (4). By exploring this interplay between texts and spaces, we hope to understand better Dreiser’s ironic critique of the war, along with its proclaimed unified aftermath. In this light, An American Tragedy—the first part of which happens in Kansas City—testifies to the violence, disorder, and alienation that gave “meaningful shape” to US lives in the wake of the Great War.

1. “What about Theodore Dreiser’s Kansas City?”

If critics attend at all to the setting of Book One, they typically see it as a generic urban locale for Clyde’s early years.⁵ Indeed, there seems to be no certainty about why Dreiser chose this city to open the novel in the first place. His letters and diaries reveal no connections to Kansas City, and his biographers—from Dorothy Dudley (1932) to Richard Lingeman (1993)—do not explain how he wrote about the city in such detail. Given his reliance upon maps, newspapers, and travel guides to write his earlier works, as well as Books Two and Three of An American Tragedy, it seems likely that he undertook a similar approach in his treatment of Kansas City. Dreiser himself famously went to upstate New York to research the latter parts of the novel. His “Lycurgus” and “Big Bittern Lake” derive from his in-person visits to “Cortland & Big Moose Lake” (Dreiser 400)—and scholars have followed in those footsteps.⁶

Whether Dreiser ever set foot in Kansas City, the verisimilitude of its representation struck local residents upon the novel’s release in December 1925. As the Kansas City Times reported on 22 January 1926, a visit by Sinclair Lewis to the city’s Rotary Club provoked the club’s president, Mr Williams, to expound upon the important linkage between literary text and geographic place:

What about Theodore Dreiser’s Kansas City? Isn’t it worth anything to have every intellectual and student in the world eventually know it? Do we go to Stratford-on-Avon to see the English basket industry? We go to see Shakespeare’s Stratford and we go to see Dickens’s London. Some people who don’t give a darn for parks and boulevards and infant industries may drop around to look reverently at Dreiser’s Kansas City. (“Mr Lewis” 2)

Associations between Dreiser and literary figures like William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens were to be expected in the 1920s, even if readers and reviewers struggled with his famously polarizing and ponderous style. After all, as Lingeman observes, Dreiser was a very close second for Lewis’s Nobel Prize in 1930—the first one awarded to an American (463). It was, in fact, Dreiser’s status as a major modern writer that inspired those literary tourists who were “dropping around” Kansas City with novel in hand, looking “reverently” for key sites and streets that “Mr Dreiser played up so importantly in his book” (“A Big” 41). Topophrenic reactions such as these affirm our place-minded reading of the novel, an approach, we will show, that illuminates the narrative’s Great War connections.

Including Dreiser’s novel in the canon of World War I literature seemed—and still seems—to invite skepticism, even disbelief. More typically, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway loom as modern novelists staking out the parameters of the US wartime and postwar experience. Given his prewar journalism at The Kansas City Star, Hemingway in particular seems much better positioned than Dreiser to connect the city and the conflict. At the end of “Soldier’s Home” (1924), despondent veteran Harold Krebs decides to move away from his family in Oklahoma to Kansas City, a trajectory that takes us back to the crowd of 100,000 standing in front of Union Station in 1921. Thus, for the “imagined” Krebs and thousands of other “real” veterans in the years following the armistice, a “real-and-imagined” Kansas City is a place of pilgrimage where troubling war memories may be put to rest.

Unlike other narratives of the interwar years that look back on the catastrophe of the Great War, An American Tragedy makes no mention of the Marne, nor the Somme, Château-Thierry, or the Argonne. There is no mention of doughboys or “Over There,” or the Armistice either. Pizer addresses this aspect of the novel’s purposeful vagueness: “Dreiser does not mention a specific date or historical event in the entire novel. Rather, he depends on the prevalence and importance in the novel of automobiles, of references to movies and popular music, and of an ambiance of dancing and prohibition style parties to establish a sense of the twenties” (217). In so doing, the novel emphasizes the “continuity of American experience” (218) from the late nineteenth century through to the present, particularly regarding the imperatives and impossibilities of the American Dream. Yet there is more going on than the “fable-like tenor of the social disruptions of the postwar era” that Thomas Riggio discerns (30–31). As Paul Orlov puts it, the novel’s “peculiarities” concerning time result in a paradox wherein the mood and tenor of the postwar period appear on every page, even though the “cataclysmic, life-altering event” (67) of the war itself seems never to have occurred. Our analysis finds several exceptions to Orlov’s rule, including the presence of Larry Donahue, an “overseas soldier” on death row (Dreiser 821). Still, we agree with Orlov’s view of Dreiser’s evocation of the postwar era, what Robert H. Elias calls “the tragedy of the twenties” (43).

But why set the novel in Kansas City—that hub of American commemorations—if only then to elide virtually all references to the war itself? And why take the events of a sensational and brutal murder case from 1906 and transform them into a postwar “fable”? According to Keith Newlin, “naturalism is an essentially didactic literature with a thesis to prove” (“Introduction” 6). Naturalists, including Dreiser, “did not merely slavishly copy the events that inspired their fictions and dress them with detail and causal explanations; they often were selective in what they chose to incorporate—or leave out—with the idea of pointing their readers to a particular didactic conclusion” (“The Documentary” 110). Paul Giles suggests that “Dreiser’s novels pride themselves on addressing less palatable social and economic facts which veiled interests would prefer to keep under wraps” (49). He goes on to observe that “the idea of a systemic suppression of truth is as central to Dreiser’s style as its revelation” (54). In 1925, given the memorializing impulse throughout the entire country, Dreiser’s novel appears to “leave out” the war, even if it offers an unpalatable portrait of the extent to which American memories “veil” and “suppress the truth” about the horrors of war and its painfully entrenched legacies.

2. Commemorative Spaces

According to Steven Trout, postwar US society was thoroughly saturated with what he calls the “iconography of remembrance—a pattern of imagery embraced by millions of Americans in the 1920s” (Memorial Fictions 8). For their part, Kansas Citians went to extraordinary memorial lengths, with 80,000 residents donating over two million dollars for the Liberty Memorial in the fall of 1919 (Donovan 20). Plus, the city erected at least 18 more First World War memorials over the next two decades (Heiman xii). With each came careful planning about where to locate new spaces of commemoration. Residents identified prominent parks and intersections to house neighborhood memorials while selecting the massive hill across from Union Station to house the Liberty Memorial.

The 1924 edition of the Automobile Blue Book summons the civic dynamism and development that inform the setting for these sites. Referring to the city as the “Heart of America,” the guidebook comments on the excellence of the local “parks and boulevards,” boasts that the “great architectural creation” of Union Station came with a $6,000,000 price tag, and paints a sunny portrait of economic growth and security: “Being the center of a region of extraordinary agricultural resources and abounding in coal, lead and iron, Kansas City has become a great commercial city” (461). Significantly, the language of the touring guide resonates with the opening of Dreiser’s novel: “Dusk—of a summer night. And the tall walls of the commercial heart of an American city of perhaps 400,000 inhabitants—such walls as in time may linger as a mere fable” (3). From the outset, Dreiser braids together booster-club descriptions and guidebook platitudes. “Heart of America” and “great commercial city” in the Blue Book merge to form the “commercial heart of an American city,” a blurring that registers a central facet of Dreiser’s novel-length critique of the extent to which capitalist commerce and the pursuit of impossible dreams takes up the “heart” of generations of working-class Americans.

The key setting in Book One of An American Tragedy is the fictitious Green-Davidson, which Clyde describes as the “very finest hotel in Kansas City” (Dreiser 33). Located at the corner of 14^th and Baltimore, the Green-Davidson exemplifies a level of excess that overawes the young bellhop-to-be, who has spent his life in rented rooms with his impoverished missionary family. Replete with luxurious materials and curated commodities, the hotel exudes exotic plenitude. Disciplined staff members race about in a whirlwind of activity; wealthy guests loll about in wraps and furs of “gorgeous textures” (46). Given Dreiser’s propensity for detailed research, one may conjecture that the Green-Davidson was an amalgamation of several of the city’s finest actual hotels—Muehlebach, President, Baltimore, and Aladdin—all located within a few downtown blocks of one another. For Kansas Citians, perhaps including readers attentive to the national press coverage of the city’s commemorative events, these hotels were noteworthy for facilitating the gatherings of local, state, national, and international leaders, while standing alongside permanent memorial sites as essential, if temporary, commemorative spaces. For instance, in October 1923, the Hotel Muehlebach staged a full day of activities for crowds of American War Mothers, convening for the fourth time to pay homage to the sacrifices of women—“to give, to wait, to fear, to hope, to suffer” (“Program” 2).

Near the end of Book One, Clyde himself joins a crowd of hotel coworkers who speed away north of the city on a January outing with their girlfriends. The raucous experiences of these teenagers last but a few hours, as their brief holiday gives way to a frenzied return to timesheets and financial anxieties. Thus begins a rapid, but carefully delineated, sequence of panicked desperation that leads readers on a catastrophic tour of Kansas City marked out by a fateful itinerary: the death of a little girl at 16^th and Wyandotte, a race along the Gillham Parkway to escape the police, the eventual crash of the car at 35^th and Cleveland, and the ending of Book One that sees Clyde at his literal and metaphorical lowest point, “crawling upon his hands and knees at first in the snow south, south and west, always toward some of those distant streets which, lamplit and faintly glowing, he saw to the southwest of him” (Dreiser 149).

Dreiser’s sensational final pages of the Kansas City section warrant close reading to appreciate heretofore unremarked symbolic and spatial associations with the Liberty Memorial. Entering downtown from the Hannibal Bridge, Clyde and his Green-Davidson colleagues work against traffic and the clock as their 6:00 pm shift approaches. Dreiser notes the time and streetscape precisely: at 5:30, they are still north of the Missouri River; at 5:40, they reach Wyandotte Avenue; moments later, they have reached 15^th and Washington. Sparser, the driver, attempts to bring them to the nearby hotel’s location at 14^th and Baltimore, but his efforts are stymied at each turn. Although close enough for them to consider walking the rest of the way, Sparser tries one final surge, resulting in the tragedy at the intersection of 16^th and Wyandotte. Two days later, after escaping to St Louis from the scene of the crime, Clyde reads a lengthy article in The Kansas City Star that gives details about the resulting accident: “[T]he eleven-year-old daughter of a well-to-do Kansas City family, knocked down and almost instantly killed—she had died an hour later.” The report stresses the class differential running through the novel, lamenting not only the child of a wealthy family “brought low” by the heedless actions of working-class youths but also “a splendid car very seriously damaged” (168).

The precise location of the girl’s demise—whether by chance or artistic design on Dreiser’s part—yields a direct line of sight to the Liberty Memorial, erected one mile to the south on Memorial Hill, an expansive space adjacent to Penn Valley Park and overlooking downtown. Given Dreiser's decision to elide direct references to the war and its aftermath, the memorial was not there for Clyde and all those involved in the accident—whether perpetrator, victim, or witness—to see. By 1925, however, the association of Kansas City with its famous memorial was already a commonplace. Indeed, the 1921 program cover of the Third National Convention of the American Legion, held in Kansas City, featured an artist’s rendering of the planned permanent memorial on its front cover (Figure 2). In 1924, one year prior to the publication of Dreiser’s novel, construction of the memorial’s 217-foot main tower was complete, with detailed work and the erection of additional memorial buildings continuing until the site’s official dedication in 1926 (Figure 3). Put another way, by 1925, the physical intersection of 16^th and Wyandotte offered a now-familiar view of a memorial setting whose significance was “real-and-imagined,” the product of years of combinative work between the site’s “real” and “imagined” topographies.

Fig. 2.

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American Legion, Official Program Third National Convention (1921). Courtesy of National WWI Memorial and Museum, Kansas City, Missouri, USA.

Fig. 3.

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Incomplete Liberty Memorial at the cornerstone laying ceremony on November 9, 1924. Courtesy of National WWI Memorial and Museum, Kansas City, Missouri, USA.

The familiarity of this setting, and its associated “pattern of imagery,” to return to Trout’s language, make Dreiser’s choice of location for the little girl’s death all the more ironic. In a place well known for its commemoration of the fallen in the world’s first major industrialized conflict, he writes against the nation’s commemorative focus on glory after death to direct our attention to the horrors of that death: the slaughter of young life by way of industrialized machinery, in this case literally, run rampant. For, in Dreiser’s scene, the little girl ran toward the Wyandotte crossing, jumped in front of the car, and “was struck and dragged a number of feet before the machine could be halted” (142). A “fallen figure,” the child’s vulnerable human frame gets crushed by wheels, weight, and mechanized velocity. This sudden and brutal loss chases Clyde out of Kansas City and shadows him throughout the remainder of the novel—and all the way to the electric chair (another form of industrialized death). Clyde and the little girl each die by machine, and the violence of those youthful deaths—both evoking familiar World War I tragedies—registers in the novel as harsh, ignominious, and utterly unnecessary.

As Clyde and his friends speed desperately away from 16^th and Wyandotte, Dreiser’s spatialized depiction of their flight invites topophrenic analysis. For all its geographic detail, the scene leaves several landmarks central to the lived experience of 1920s Kansas City unremarked: Union Station, Pershing Drive, the Liberty Memorial, and the nearby Union Cemetery, home to both Civil War and WWI dead. How, then, to make sense of such glaring omissions? A broader application of Toni Morrison’s reflections on racial absences, to which we will return later, offers one answer. In “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” (1988), Morrison reminds us:

invisible things are not necessarily “not-there”; that a void may be empty but not be a vacuum. In addition, certain absences are so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves; arrest us with intentionality and purpose, like neighborhoods that are defined by the population held away from them. (136)

As Clyde and his friends flee the scene, what emerges is a depiction of Kansas City absent its familiar memorial topography, so thoroughly established prior to the novel’s publication. Upon closer reflection, the apparently invisible memorial landscape is “not necessarily ‘not-there’” in a novel where absences, both ornate and planned, present an ironic narrative critical of the omnipresence of popular postwar commemorative culture.

Massive in scale and dramatic in height, the Liberty Memorial stands as a study in contrast with the lowly deaths recounted in An American Tragedy. The towering shaft, which features four sculpted “Guardian Spirits”—Honor, Sacrifice, Patriotism, and Courage—was described by designer Harold Van Buren Magonigle as a “cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night” (qtd. in Donovan 41). The main dedicatory inscription on the pillar itself reads: “In Honor of Those Who Served in The World War in Defense of Liberty and our Country.” Near the base of the tower stands a pair of 32-foot sculpted sphinxes: “Memory” facing east, “The Future” facing west. The visages of these figures remain hidden, however, cloaked beneath their wings. The one cannot bear to look back upon the horrors of the war; the other cannot see what is to come. Self-shrouded, the enigmatic sphinxes sow confusion and, thus, compel visitors to return their gaze to the central pillar, which, transforming into a beacon of light each night, broadcasts its encouragement to honor those who served by living the values of the Guardian Spirits.

Unlike the static sculptural elements of the Liberty Memorial, Clyde and friends hurtle through Dreiser’s car-chase scene at break-neck speed. Sparser turns off the car’s headlights as he enters into a series of streets still under development, and this fateful decision leads to a second accident as they plow into piles of paving stones and lumber. No one is killed when the car overturns at 35^th and Cleveland, but Clyde’s friends sustain injuries and try confusedly to escape as the police close in. Clyde succeeds in this immediate task. Of course, the site of his success here, the end point of his frenetic Kansas City travel story, is marked by precisely the kind of pause that, to borrow from Yi-Fu Tuan, “makes it possible for location to be transformed into place” (6). As his flight comes to an end in a low-lying neighborhood a full 36 blocks to the southeast of Kansas City’s Memorial Hill apex, Clyde pauses to agonize over the prospect of going to jail: “Oh, how terrible that thought was—grinding really like a macerating wheel to his flesh” (Dreiser 148). He looks upon streets at a distance, “lamplit and faintly glowing” (149), which suddenly transforms his mere location into a defined place: the nadir of his Kansas City existence. As he crawls away on the spatial periphery of Book One, the literal darkness of the night matches the metaphorical darkness of his sins, confronting him with “unending dissatisfaction and disappointment” (149) over his failure to uphold any of the divinely sanctioned values of his missionary family, to say nothing of the national ideals associated with the Guardian Spirits atop Kansas City’s pillar of fire.

At the novel’s close, as Clyde’s journey ends on death row, his thoughts echo with the conflicted message of the Liberty Memorial’s Sphinxes: “[T]he past was so painful to contemplate at any point. It seared and burned. And the present . . . as well as the future with its deadly fear of what was certain to happen . . . were two phases equally frightful to his waking consciousness” (Dreiser 836). It is the sphinxes of the Liberty Memorial, in their recognition of the searing pain of the past and the frightful future, rather than the tower in its pious insistence on fleeting grief and eternal glory, that best aligns with the sentiment of Dreiser’s ironic commentary on popular commemorative narratives that shape the 1920s US. Without any direct reference to the Liberty Memorial, the setting of Dreiser’s narrative functions spatially to draw our attention away from the uplifting message of its tallest and most obvious component, the dramatic heights of the tower atop Memorial Hill. Instead, the reader confronts the challenging dimensions of its most cryptic element, the riddling Sphinxes, which emblematize the obscurity that envelopes Clyde at 35^th and Cleveland.

3. Commemorative Silences

If Dreiser’s novel exposes the gap between the ideals and realities of American WWI commemorative spaces, An American Tragedy also reminds us that the silencing of women’s commemorative narratives is a constant in the American memorial landscape. Two of the novel’s female characters suffer and mourn the loss of their adult children: Mrs. Alden, the mother of Clyde’s fiancée, Roberta, whom he murdered, and Clyde’s mother, Elvira, who struggles in vain to prevent her son’s execution. Whether the result of poverty or crime, of neighborhood accident or international conflagration, the griefs of these women, like those of so many other postwar mothers, rarely finds expression beyond the confines of an individual woman’s internal thoughts or her private home. Mrs. Alden, for instance, processes the news of the death of her daughter “sinking heavily and without a word to the floor” (Dreiser 550). Later, when attending Clyde’s trial, she responds to the presentation of evidence with a “whimpering yet clear cry” (709) before fainting and being removed from the courtroom. Similarly, Elvira’s emotional struggles remain confined to the privacy of her prayers and personal reflections, which Dreiser represents by blending third-person narration and free indirect discourse. For example, upon learning of Clyde’s arrest for Roberta’s murder, Elvira’s thoughts begin to race:

She paused, full of that intense misery and terror which no faith in the revealed and comforting verities of God and mercy and salvation which she was always proclaiming, could for the moment fend against. Her boy! Her Clyde! In jail, accused of murder! She must wire! She must write! She must go, maybe. But how to get the money! What to do when she got there. How to get the courage—the faith—to endure it. . . . Merciful God! Would her troubles never end? (665)

Here, we encounter her despair over the fate of her son. She looks to God for guidance and strength but doubts her own faith and capacity to endure the pain. Alone in her suffering, she “retreat[s] into some still, silent place, where, for the time being at least, no evil human ill could reach her” (666).

Ironically, though the novel is suffused with death, it mentions neither a funeral nor a grave for any of its deceased characters, including the little girl and Roberta. In fact, the only glimpse of a cemetery arises in the Lycurgus, NY, section of the novel via the narrator’s mocking review of the town’s spatial arrangements, which hyperbolically link death with mechanization: “[A]n old and interesting graveyard, cheek by jowl with an automobile sales room” (Dreiser 201). Whether intentional or not, this literary exclusion of a central site of mourning in Western culture reflected perfectly, if not painfully, the circumstances of postwar mourning for thousands of American women. In other words, without directly referring to the Great War, Dreiser once again evokes the personal tragedies ensuing in its aftermath.

In marginalizing these fictitious women’s grief, Dreiser offers glimpses of the reality of American mothers whose wartime experiences and losses remained, with few exceptions, a matter for private reflection. Perhaps the most famous of such exceptions, which only arose five long years after the publication of Dreiser’s novel, was the government-sponsored Gold Star pilgrimages that carried more than 6,000 grieving women to their fallen sons’ and husbands’ overseas graves between 1930 and 1933. First organized by a group of women in Washington, DC, in 1928 and named after the gold stars that families across the country had begun to display upon receiving the news of their loved one’s deaths, the American Gold Star Mothers provided a national organization for the dozens of local associations across the country.⁷ During the immediate postwar years, these organizations provided community and solace for mourning women, as well as support for those who sought the kind of closure that graveside visits alone can provide.

Not everyone was allowed to find relief in the government-funded pilgrimages. The trips were closed, either partially or in full, to widows who had remarried and mothers and wives of American men who had fought under foreign flags. Also excluded or “unspoken,” to borrow from Morrison, were African American mothers and wives, who only gained support for segregated pilgrimages conducted under much less hospitable conditions than those of their white counterparts after considerable public debate and Congressional wrangling.⁸ In light of these excluded groups, it becomes clear that many American women had to confront their wartime losses without access to their loved ones’ final resting places.

Even though women’s suffering, sacrifice, and grief were all too often rendered invisible in the period, one important memorial did exist—one erected by and addressed to women. Located in the Kansas City’s far eastern region, a distant 12 miles from Memorial Hill, the Jackson County American War Mothers and Gold Star League Memorial commemorates the county’s 522 war dead (Figure 4). Unveiled on 4 October 1923 during the fourth annual national convention of the American War Mothers, which had opened five days earlier in Kansas City, this modest memorial lacks all the splendor and scale of the Liberty Memorial. The slender boulder bears a simple plaque that dedicates the site to “those heroic boys of Jackson County who gave their lives in noble sacrifice to our country in the World War 1914–1918.”

Fig. 4.

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American War Mothers Program (1923, p. 14). Courtesy of National WWI Memorial and Museum, Kansas City, Missouri, USA.

Like those of most major commemorative gatherings in Kansas City since 1921, the convention program cover once again featured an artistic rendering of the Liberty Memorial (Figure 5). Unlike the 1921 American Legion program cover, which simply featured the memorial itself, the American War Mothers cover image superimposes upon the site an allegorical woman, seated centrally in the composition. Flanked on either side by a soldier and sailor standing at attention, this female figure challenges the primacy of male war experience and invites reflection on the key role that women played both during and after the war.⁹ Along with the viewer of the cover, all eyes in the image gaze upon a pillar-like embodiment of women’s wartime contributions and ongoing postwar suffering and service, not upon the commemorative pillar of the Liberty Memorial.

Fig. 5.

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American War Mothers, Fourth National Convention Program (1923). Courtesy of National WWI Memorial and Museum, Kansas City, Missouri, USA.

Like the Gold Star Mothers, the American War Mothers constituted a national organization overseeing the work of dozens of state and local associations whose wartime purpose of rallying mothers to the cause of war evolved to focus on the support of veterans and mothers after the war. In a unique and remarkable show of motherly solidarity, the national convention elected to include the Jackson County memorial dedication on its agenda, and mothers from each of the then-48 states and the District of Columbia sprinkled soil from their home states, as well as water from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, at the base of the boulder. As one local reporter observed, the ceremony blended personal and local memories into a broader national narrative for the assembled Gold Star Mothers, “the poignant recollection of the day when ‘taps’ was sounded for her boy” (“War Mothers” 2).

Such contemporaneous accounts show that the county memorial and its dedication ceremony encouraged the kind of community and support that Dreiser’s mourning women lacked. Memorials produced by women’s groups were too few to change the overall character of a US culture of memorialization focused heavily on the heroism and sacrifice of soldiers. Most of the mothers’ memorials shared this focus rather than draw attention to the burdens and experiences of mothers and women themselves (Wingate 175–76). Acknowledging this fact in their program for the 1923 national convention, the War Mothers lamented that the nation’s postwar monuments “have for the most part told of the triumphs of kings and warriors; the mother has not been given her rightful place in the triumphal march” (“Program” 2). Yet, even as the organization attempted through both the setting and rhetoric of its national convention to integrate the experiences of women and mothers into the commemorative narrative emerging with the Liberty Memorial project, they found themselves alone in their efforts. Understandably perhaps, the War Mothers conference of 1923 excited none of the national and international interest that the site dedication of the Liberty Memorial in 1921 had enjoyed, and little of the sentiment expressed during the Jackson County memorial dedication ceremony found an echo in that famed local and national commemorative epicenter.

In an epilogue entitled “Souvenir,” which itself recalls the memorializing impulses of the era, An American Tragedy ends with Clyde’s mother now on the streets of San Francisco. Wearing “an unrelieved costume of black” (Dreiser 867), her unending mission work now takes place in the heart of another city. A sign on the wall of the Griffiths family’s mission house in Kansas City asked visitors, “How Long Since You Wrote to Mother?” (10). But here in San Francisco, in the wake of Clyde’s execution, the sign is typographically diminished and has lost its interrogative note: “How long since you wrote to Mother” (869).¹⁰ Like the thousands of American War Mothers who lost sons in the conflict, Elvira will never again receive a letter—a souvenir—from her boy. Dressed in mourning, like so many of the mothers who appeared in the 1923 program in Kansas City, she exits the novel in near-total obscurity. Similarly, the war mothers of America were relegated to the margins of the nation’s postwar commemorative landscape. Thus, in the same way that An American Tragedy appeals to matters of mourning and memory without directly referencing the war, Dreiser’s novel finds a way to recall the forgotten suffering of women in the postwar US, despite the ironic absence of war mothers from its pages.

4. Commemorative Inequities

In addition to the silent suffering in US commemorative culture after the First World War, An American Tragedy makes vivid the fundamental inequities that shaped the lived experience of memorialization efforts in towns and cities across the country. Echoing a conventional sentiment engraved in commemorative sites, an inscription added to the Liberty Memorial in 1935 promised, “The glory dies not and the grief is past” (Donovan 86). For many veterans, however, such popular expressions of eternal glory proved far from reality. Upon their return from war, many veterans confronted a host of challenges, from unemployment and physical disability to a lack of government support and an inability to reintegrate into civilian life.¹¹ For others, it was incarceration, as Dreiser’s fleeting glimpse of Larry Donahue, one of Clyde’s fellow death row inmates, reveals.

That Donahue’s striking introduction arrives so late in the narrative (on page 821 of an 869-page novel) merits consideration here. For here we take our most vigorous exception to Dreiser scholars’ tendency to view uncritically the absence of the war in An American Tragedy while nevertheless concluding that the novel reflects, as Orlov puts it, “the mood, behavior, and phenomena of America in the postwar period” (67). But what does it mean that Dreiser appears to have written a novel of the 1920s that elides reference to the 4,000,000 veterans of the American Expeditionary Force, the myriad lingering consequences of total war mobilization for the nation’s 100,000,000 citizens, and the frenzied construction of World War I memorials from coast to coast, all of which, taken together, was no less a defining feature of the 1920s than “automobiles,” “popular music,” and “prohibition style parties” (Pizer 217)? Rather than elide references to the war and its aftermath, the novel, we contend, italicizes them, however paradoxically, through their “ornately planned” ironic absence. Put another way, the very absence of Donahue—or any soldier, for that matter—from the first 95% of Dreiser’s detailed naturalist tour of 1920s America undermines the sincerity of a boastful postwar commemorative culture that promised never to forget.

Dreiser’s one explicit reference to a veteran, whose abbreviated and belated appearance borders on absence in light of the novel's length, deserves close scrutiny:

And big Larry Donahue—square-headed, square-shouldered—big of feet and hands, an overseas soldier, who, being ejected from a job as night watchman in a Brooklyn factory, had lain for the foreman who had discharged him—and then killed him on an open common somewhere at night, but without the skill to keep from losing a service medal which had eventually served to betray and identify him. (821)

The writer’s emphasis on the monumental scale and statuesque qualities of this death row inmate—“square” and “big”—are ironically compressed here into a single sentence. Both the sentence and the cell cut him down to size. Broken up by dashes, Donahue’s postwar life moves swiftly from demobilization to incarceration through night shifts, job loss, premeditation, vengeance, and betrayal. This compression indirectly critiques the oversimplifying concision of the nation’s memorial discourse, which often truncates the lives of veterans to a conventional, reductive narrative—lived, fought, died—and insists upon an unqualified heroism. Here Dreiser portrays a soldier who lived, fought, murdered, and was executed. Just as memorials fail to tell us anything about the shortcomings that inevitably marked the human lives of the nation’s proclaimed war heroes, Donahue’s sentence-length biography tells us nothing of the complex humanity in the life of a criminal. He stoically utters his final words, “Good-by boys. Good luck” (828), as if heading over the top into a field of fire in Belleau Wood—and that is the last we see of him. Like the inscriptions adorning plaques and plinths across the nation, then, Dreiser’s account of a soldier in 1920s America provokes more questions than it answers.

Yet Donahue’s limited prison cell appearance presents a suggestive ex-serviceman narrative quite familiar in the 1920s. Acknowledging veterans’ difficulties in beginning new postwar lives, the American Legion itself expressed concern in 1922 over the number of former soldiers imprisoned for crimes committed during their “restless period of settling down” (qtd. in Keene 162). Compounding matters was the worry, as many Americans articulated, whether soldiers “conditioned to kill could resume normal lives as productive and peaceful citizens” (162). Larry Donahue’s story echoes with the real fate of soldiers like Arthur E. Haensel, convicted in 1919 for murdering his wife. Haensel’s case drew national attention as he successfully evaded the gallows through four appeals before entertaining “his guards with recitals of his war experiences” in a fifth and final “night of terror” in the death chamber (“Veteran” 8). ¹² Given the widespread media coverage of cases like Haensel’s, the tendency of Dreiser scholars to miss or misread Larry Donahue’s significance is all the more surprising.¹³ Indeed, Donahue’s brief appearance yields a powerful reflection of the many working-class American veterans who did, in fact, die in prisons all over the country.

As if to drive this point home further, Dreiser adds one final forensic detail to Donahue’s story that corresponds with what Trout describes as the “memory culture” (On the Battlefield 49) of the American Expeditionary Forces. Of all the possible pieces of evidence that might have led to Donahue’s capture, it was his “service medal” (Dreiser 821), a kind of personal memorial intended to impart lasting glory, that, when discovered at the scene of the crime, spelled the end for the overseas soldier. According to Trout, these medals were offered to every overseas American soldier and “identified the particular engagements in which its recipient participated,” as well as “the wearer’s military record” (On the Battlefield 50). In a typically Dreiserian irony, rather than identify the heroic battle record of Donahue’s military past, his service medal merely serves to betray him to the arresting authorities.

If Larry Donahue underscores the inequities of the US’s postwar commemorative realities, so too did those characters who languished with him and Clyde Griffiths on death row. In addition to four Italian Americans, one Hungarian immigrant, and several German- and Irish Americans, Dreiser’s inmates include a “young Jew” (Dreiser 844) convicted of murder during an armed robbery, a Chinese immigrant who “spoke a few words of English” (827), and Wash Higgins, an African American who “stabbed a waiter in a restaurant . . . who had refused him food and then insulted him” (844). While none of these prisoners were soldiers, they nevertheless recall those working-class and immigrant communities of US society largely excluded from the postwar commemorative landscape.

From the moment that war erupted in Europe in summer 1914, it was clear that any eventual US involvement would require the country to grapple in earnest with the ethnic and racial tensions that its history of slavery and immigration had produced. When the nation finally did enter the war, its official policies reflected two key principles: 100%ism and racial segregation. The former reflected long-established thinking among early twentieth-century elites, including President Woodrow Wilson, and patriotic organizations, such as the Union League Club in Chicago, where Clyde Griffiths reprises his bell-hop role before departing on his fatal journey to upstate New York. Taking the political and cultural diversity produced by the US’s immigrant past as a domestic and foreign policy liability, 100%ers sought the full assimilation of hyphenated Americans to those Anglo-American civic values deemed by the League to be the basis of US culture (Litwicki 117).¹⁴

Both during the war and in its wake, prevailing nativist sentiments required many Americans—such as those “imagined” figures on Dreiser’s death row, along with, most famously, the “real” Italian Americans Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and even Dreiser himself (a German American)—to either abandon their hyphenated identities or confront a wave of discrimination and violence.¹⁵ Perhaps even more painful was the reality that African Americans faced. Not granted any option of assimilation, they served instead in mostly segregated military units and, in the case of the famed Harlem Hellfighters of the 369^th Infantry Regiment, under foreign command to assuage white commanders’ fears of Black soldiers. ¹⁶

By the time Dreiser’s novel appeared in 1925, the assimilationist and segregationist views that had shaped the US’s fighting of the war also defined the commemorative landscape. Embracing 100%ism as one of its founding principles, the American Legion drew upon its own constitution when drafting the text for its banquet held in Kansas City during the 1921 site dedication of the Liberty Memorial. “For God and Country,” the Legion declared, “we associate ourselves together . . . to foster & perpetuate a one hundred per cent Americanism” (qtd. in Donovan 60). Clearly embodying such attitudes, neither the sculptural drafts in circulation at the time of Dreiser’s publication, nor the frieze on the north side of the Liberty Memorial completed a decade later, contained anything other than generic, Greco-Roman composites of this ideal Americanism. At the dedication of the Liberty Memorial in 1926, President Coolidge cemented the postwar extension of wartime myths when he professed that, during the war, the country “attained a conscious national unity which it never before possessed.” To be sure, the death row inmates who Dreiser depicts experienced a very different country from the one the President lauded. Even the site selection of the Liberty Memorial itself was shaped by the class biases and fears of local elites of the “development of a larger and more entrenched slum” (Eggener 314) that might detract from the grandeur and profitability of the new Union Station district.¹⁷ The memorial grounds constituted what Morrison might describe as one of those “neighborhoods that are defined by the population held away from them” (136).

Despite tremendous wartime service at home and abroad, African American citizens particularly struggled to find a place in the nation’s commemorative neighborhoods. Throughout the country, memorial sculpture rarely included African American figures.¹⁸ Perhaps the most popular, mass-produced figure was Ernest Moore Viquesney’s Spirit of the American Doughboy. Placed atop plinths in parks and town squares seemingly everywhere, Viquesney’s victorious soldier constituted what the American Legion endorsed as a “100% PERFECT” composite representation of the ideal soldier (Wingate 62). In addition to erasing all but a handful of immigrant communities, Viquesney’s work perpetuated those commemorative inequities that cast the contributions and sacrifices of the nation’s 370,000 Black veterans “outside the U.S. Army, and, in a symbolic sense, outside of the nation itself” (Williams 120).

In response to such erasure, some African American citizens endeavored to ensure that Black servicemen appeared in the physical memorial record. In France, for example, veterans of the 371^st and 372^nd Infantry Regiments designed and erected monuments to their units and their fallen.¹⁹ More striking, perhaps, is the memorial that Black residents of Kimball, WV, dedicated in 1928. Among the first of its kind to be built in the US in the wake of the Great War, the memorial building began with a successful petition by the local African American community to the county government for constructing such a memorial. Perhaps moved by the demographic history of McDowell county, whose coal-based economy had long depended on the labor of European immigrants and African Americans like those on Dreiser’s death row, local officials enlisted the help of West Virginian architect and veteran Hassel T. Hicks, whose design gave the building its classical column-adorned face. Like Magonigle, who envisioned the Liberty Memorial’s crowning figures as the embodiment of honor, sacrifice, patriotism, and courage, Hicks dedicated the four columns of his memorial building to charity, faith in the nation’s institutions, hope for an end to injustice, and the service of everyone for everyone.²⁰

While Clyde’s conduct falls well short of the standards set by Kimball’s columns and Kansas City’s Guardian Spirits, the contrast between the values embodied by the two sites points to the distinct realities underlying the nation’s commemorative inequities. If Kansas City’s Liberty Memorial assumed the unity and equality professed by so many official wartime proclamations, Kimball’s addition to the memorial landscape, like Dreiser’s prison community, more soberly assesses the realities of a postwar world declared “safe for Democracy.”

5. Conclusion

As Clyde faces execution, we see his life come full circle: from the narrow confines of his impoverished family lodgings in Kansas City to the merciless constraints of “that terrible chair” (Dreiser 866). Significantly, Dreiser circles back, at the novel’s very end, to Elvira Griffiths, whose “dress, bonnet, shoes” (867) convey perpetual mourning for a son who killed others and was killed in return. Now a grandmother, Clyde’s mother sings hymns and offers street testimonials amidst the “tall walls of the commercial heart of the city of San Francisco” (866). The family’s Kansas City mission, “The Door of Hope” (10), becomes in its West coast iteration, “The Star of Hope” (869). Although she is no Gold Star Mother, her face is “definitely seamed with lines of misery and suffering” (867). In the seams of their miserable faces, the novel’s characters—both indirectly and directly—emphasize the war’s lasting and painful legacies. Drawing attention to the contrast between the “real” topography of America's postwar commemorative epicenter and the “imagined” setting of a story, which begins at “Dusk—of a summer night” in Kansas City, Dreiser's novel illuminates, then, a “real-and-imagined” postwar space in which, for millions, contrary to the promises of the Liberty Memorial, grief, not glory, endured. This, in fact, was the American tragedy of the Great War.

Notes

Works Cited

Author notes