THEODORE DREISER

Many nineteenth-century Americans came to believe that human society advanced through fierce competition — an idea that reflected the cutthroat world of American business. In The Financier (1912), novelist Theodore Dreiser traces the rise of Frank Cowperwood, a character loosely based on that of real-life financier and streetcar magnate Charles Yerkes. Here, Dreiser suggests how one future businessman came to replace his mother’s Christian faith with a belief in “survival of the fittest.”

[Frank] could not figure out how this thing he had come into — this life — was organized. How did all these people get into the world? What were they doing here? Who started things, anyhow? His mother told him the story of Adam and Eve, but he didn’t believe it. …

One day he saw a squid and a lobster put in [a] tank, and in connection with them was witness to a tragedy which stayed with him all his life and cleared things up considerably intellectually. The lobster, it appeared from the talk of the idle bystanders, was offered no food, as the squid was considered his rightful prey. He lay at the bottom of the clear glass tank … apparently seeing nothing — you could not tell in which way his beady, black buttons of eyes were looking — but apparently they were never off the body of the squid. The latter, pale and waxy in texture, looking very much like pork fat or jade, moved about in torpedo fashion; but his movements were apparently never out of the eyes of his enemy, for by degrees small portions of his body began to disappear, snapped off by the relentless claws of his pursuer. …

[One day] only a portion of the squid remained. … The boy stayed as long as he could, the bitter struggle fascinating him. Now, maybe, or in an hour or a day, the squid might die, slain by the lobster, and the lobster would eat him. He looked again at the greenish-copperish engine of destruction in the corner and wondered when this would be. … He returned that night, and lo! the expected had happened. There was a little crowd around the tank. The lobster was in the corner. Before him was the squid cut in two and partially devoured. …

The incident made a great impression on him. It answered in a rough way that riddle which had been annoying him so much in the past: ‘How is life organized?’ Things lived on each other — that was it. Lobsters lived on squids and other things. What lived on lobsters? Men, of course! … And what lived on men? he asked himself. Was it other men? Wild animals lived on men. And there were Indians and cannibals. And some men were killed by storms and accidents. He wasn’t so sure about men living on men; but men did kill each other. …

[Frank] was already pondering on what he should be in this world, and how he should get along. From seeing his father count money, he was sure that he would like banking; and Third Street, where his father’s office was, seemed to him the cleanest, most fascinating street in the world.

SOURCE : Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1912), 10–15.