Middle european scientific bulletin issn 2694-9970

MIDDLE EUROPEAN SCIENTIFIC BULLETIN 
ISSN 2694-9970 
213 
Middle European Scientific Bulletin, VOLUME 10 March 2021 
 
concern with the immateriality of money that speculated under financial capitalism. Almost the first 
thing that Cowperwood learns about the financial system is its unpredictability and the arbitrariness of 
valuations. His first employer as a broker explains that anything can make or break a market. The strong 
implication is that in posing Cowperwood against the false moralism, Dreiser undercuts the principles 
of underlying Progressive reform. In a novel of repetitions and variations, Dreiser parallels 
Cowperwood’s career with that of Jay Cooke, the Philadelphia financier who made his name during the 
Civil War and whose bankruptcy precipitated the crash of 1873. Through these parallels, The 
Financier intertwines both men’s financial manipulations with particularly intense periods of American 
national feeling, and the effects of such emotions on the financial markets. 
Cowperwood’s“first great financial”
5
opportunity arises out of the need to generate capital to 
finance the Union, the State of Pennsylvania – during the Civil War. The lesson intensifies the already 
businesslike turn of Cowperwood’s mind. Cowperwood has sought to maintain as much as possible the 
autonomy of financial and business considerations from all other contexts. Cowperwood now sees an 
opportunity in putting a price on patriotism. What he learns from Cooke is the project of making a 
rational assessment of the market’s irrationality, in this case the irrationality of feeling for the nation.
The novel suggests two ways of financial speculation: rapacious, which usually brings a success 
which is unsatisfying; and intentionally productive, which brings hubristic over-reach and failure. 
Pushed to its logical conclusion, this dualism explodes the distinctions through which Progressives 
sought to regulate the “abuses” of capitalism and ensure its productivity, efficiency, and moderation. Of 
course Progressivism is long spent as a political force, and in some respects “The Financier” foretells its 
swing to the political right and subsequent dissipation during World War I. But it also makes 
uncomfortable reading for those of us who are drawn to excoriate unethical banking practices, while 
depending upon global financial systems for credit, capital, investments and pensions.
A widespread sense of the inability of our political institutions to address the contemporary 
crisis suggests that in some way we are already familiar with the implications of the novel. “The 
financial system Dreiser depicts is a shadowy, even mystical presence that co-opts attempts to control or 
regulate it, whether on the part of individuals or in the name of the nation.”
6
“Indeed, far from imposing 
a stabilizing framework upon speculation, Dreiser shows the nation as adding to the irrationality of the 
market, both directly in economic terms, in forms such as the land grants made to encourage railroad 
construction, and in giving rise to the less tangible but equally powerful vision of empire that turns out 
to be “only a vision of empire”
7
. 
“The Financier” was not Dreiser’s final word on the topic. Having continued Cowperwood’s 
story in “The Titan” (1914), Dreiser returned to the projected trilogy at intervals and was still working 
on the final volume, entitled “The Stoic”, when he died in December 1945. Shifting geographical 
focus, “The Stoic” depicts Cowperwood’s involvement in the financing of London’s underground 
railway. It rehearses the inevitable decline and ultimate failure to realize his visions, his death, and the 
subsequent dissipation of his fortune, his art gallery and other possessions, all of which had been
foretold in an appendix to “The Financier”.
5
Dreiser, Theodore. The Financier.The Critical Edition.Ed. Roark Mulligan. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010
6
Pizer, Donald. The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study. Minneapolis: UniversityofMinnesotaPress, 1976. 
7
Dreiser, Theodore. The Financier.The Critical Edition.Ed. Roark Mulligan. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010:545 

---