Dreiser’s Anti-Corporate Tools: Veil-Piercing and the Novel of Corporate Agency

Abstract

Try as you might to be a corporate agitator, you will become a corporate shill. Theodore Dreiser delivers this grim message in “The Toil of the Laborer” (1913), a journalistic depiction of his predicament working for a “great corporation … a vast lever,” otherwise known as the New York Central Railroad (“Toil” 20). Employed as a manual laborer, Dreiser observes how the wealthy corporation relies on “unjust exaction” from its workers, a dynamic he vows to combat if opportunity knocks (22). Yet, when promoted from laborer to foreman, Dreiser breaks his moral promise, working his men just as hard as his foreman worked him. The reason is not ignorance, denial, or befuddling of his ethical compass; he still sees that “in so far as the corporation was concerned,” the laborers were “mere machines” for exploitation. Nor is the problem his will or intention, since he tries “to adjust [his] new relationship to the ideal which [he] had held before [him]self,” while complying with the company’s rules. Instead, Dreiser struggles with how to avoid performing the role of replaceable corporate cog: “If [he] did not fulfill the company’s orders, someone else would” (23), just as Sister Carrie’s (1900) desperate George Hurstwood becomes a trolley-driving scab (424). Foreman Dreiser cannot discover a way to act on the company that was not also to act for the company’s “unjust exaction.” Discouraged, he quits, choosing “not to be a tool in the hands of those who were tools themselves … even though by quitting I could not relieve the situation of its pain” (“Toil” 25).