David Graham Phillips (1867–1911)

My spouse found an old newspaper from 1906 that listed books one might choose to give as Christmas gifts. This book was one of them, and eventually I found a copy of it. I believe I got this book from the Internet Archive. The kindle book comes from OCR on the book scan with little or no subsequent editing. Thus, there are lots of errors in the formatting. Still, the book was easily readable.

The book is essentially the diary of a young woman who was well connected with Washington, D.C. society, but who had fallen on hard times and who had to take a job (in preference to marrying an ass). A couple of her influential friends hooked her up with a new senator from the sticks and his wife. She set about a campaign to make the two of them "factors" in the Washington social scene. As is the case today, Washington is pretty much ruled by wealth and influence. It's about as corrupt a place as you can find.

I'm not sure if people were quite as stupid back then as what we have in today's Congress (Rand Paul is dumb as shit, and is considered a possible future President), but that part isn't really dealt with in this book. Whatever, it was an OK read, albeit not one I'd have missed not ever having read.
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I'm hard pressed to figure out how to rate this book, in some ways, it's quite good, in others, rather tedious. It could use some serious editing, as the author goes on a bit much. The story itself is interesting and keeps one's attention pretty well. The social attitudes that drive the story would no longer hold sway today. I could be wrong, of course, but I doubt very many people today would think that the mere fact of one's having been born out of wedlock automatically means that one is morally tainted. Yet that is the situation with Susan Lennox. Everyone around her pretty much assumed she had the moral inclinations towards the gutter merely because of the situation of her birth. She doesn't see it that way, however, so strives through a series of trials, towards total independence. She wanted to be her own mistress, so to speak, not the kept woman, either as spouse, mistress, or one-night stand of men.

The book is somewhat flawed by Phillips' constant preaching against conventional morality, his flawed observations on the human condition and so forth. Phillips seems to think he's the only smart person in the room and that those not subscribing to his points of view are delusional fools. It's not uncommon to find jerks within the pages of literature, but one doesn't generally discover that the real jerk in the pages is the author himself.

Still, it was an interesting take on the times, times which in some ways aren't all that different from our own. The plutocrats are still fleecing the rest of us for their personal benefit. The church is still not practicing what it preaches.
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