Frank Cowperwood as a Fantasy Figure: A Few More Thoughts

Reading Theodore Dreiser's Frank Cowperwood novels I was struck by his esteem for the successful businessman as, if nothing else, a forceful player of a brutal game, with Cowperwood epitomizing such. It seemed that Dreiser was similarly capable of respect for the successful political machine boss of those days, who was commonly a businessman in his own right (and indeed, in running his machine rather businessman-like).

By contrast Dreiser's attitude toward, for example, the guardians of law and order in the police and courts was very different--and the politicians those machine bosses put in office, too.

One can see it as a matter of the businessmen and the machine bosses being the ones who had the power in the situation--the ones whose order was what "law and order" meant, who decided who got to be politician rather than the other way around, with this reflected in what a spineless, pathetic bunch the elected officials seem in The Titan when Cowperwood blackmails the city mayor with evidences of an affair of the kind Cowperwood himself carried on without the least compunction, and even more in those last pages of the book where Chicago's aldermen, fearing a public in a lynching mood against anyone who voted for Cowperwood's street-car franchise, did not dare stick by the protagonist when the roll is called. It mattered, too, that their share of the rewards of power corresponded to their different places in the system.

However, I suspect that those early days Dreiser spent in journalism, and just how much he saw of the police and the courts especially, mattered in forming his feeling here (which carried over to An American Tragedy to go by Clyde Griffiths' trial). By contrast a businessman like Frank Cowperwood's real-life inspiration Charles Yerkes, in being rather more remote from Dreiser's personal experience and observation, left him more room to fancy what a superior being such could be as he conceived the protagonist of his books.