Upton
Sinclair was
born in Baltimore on 20th September, 1878. His alcoholic father moved
the family to New York City in 1888. Although his own family were
extremely poor, he spent periods of time living with his wealthy grandparents.
He later argued that witnessing these extremes turned him into a socialist.
A religious boy with a great love of literature, his two great heroes
were Jesus Christ and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
An intelligent boy he did well at school and at 14 entered New
York City College.
Soon afterwards he had his first story published in a national magazine.
Over the next few years Sinclair funded his college education by writing
stories for newspapers and magazines. By the age of 17 Sinclair was
earning enough money to enable him to move into his own apartment
while supplying his parents with a regular income.
Sinclair's first novel, Springtime
and Harvest,
was published in 1901. He followed this with
The
Journal of Arthur Stirling
(1903), Prince
Hagen
(1903) Manassas
(1904) and A
Captain of Industry
(1906), but they all sold badly.
In the early 1900s Sinclair became an active socialist
after reading books such as Merrie
England (Robert Blatchford),
The People of the Abyss
(Jack London), Appeal
to the Young (Peter Kropotkin)
and Octypus (Frank
Norris). In September 1905, Sinclair joined with Jack
London, Clarence Darrow and Florence
Kelley to form the Intercollegiate Socialist
Society.
The work of Frank Norris
was especially important to the development of Sinclair as a writer.
He later spoke about how Norris had "showed me a new world, and
he also showed me that it could be put in a novel." Sinclair
was also influenced by the investigative journalism of Benjamin
Flower, Ida Tarbell, Lincoln
Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker.
In 1904 Fred Warren, the editor of the
socialist journal, Appeal
to Reason, commissioned Sinclair to write a novel about
immigrant workers in the Chicago
meat packing houses. Julius Wayland, the owner of the journal provided
Sinclair with a $500 advance and after seven weeks research he wrote
the novel, The Jungle.
Serialized in 1905, the book helped to increase circulation to 175,000.
However, Sinclair had his novel rejected by six publishers. A consultant
at Macmillan wrote: "I advise without hesitation and unreservedly
against the publication of this book which is gloom and horror unrelieved.
One feels that what is at the bottom of his fierceness is not nearly
so much desire to help the poor as hatred of the rich."
Sinclair decided to publish the book himself and after advertising
his intentions in the Appeal
to Reason, he he got orders for 972 copies. When he
told Doubleday of these orders, it decided to publish the book. The
Jungle
(1906) was an immediate success selling over 150,000 copies. Within
the next few years The
Jungle
had been published in seventeen languages and was a best-seller all
over the world.
After President Theodore Roosevelt
read The
Jungle
and ordered an investigation of the meat-packing industry. He also
met Sinclair and told him that while he disapproved of the way the
book preached socialism he agreed that "radical action must be
taken to do away with the efforts of arrogant and selfish greed on
the part of the capitalist."
With the passing of the Pure Food and Drugs Act (1906) and the Meat
Inspection Act (1906), Sinclair was able to show that novelists could
help change the law. This in itself inspired a tremendous growth in
investigative journalism. Theodore Roosevelt
became concerned at this development and described it as muckraking.
Sinclair was now a well-known national figure and decided to accept
the offer of the Socialist Party to
become its candidate for Congress in New Jersey. The venture was unsuccessful
with Sinclair winning only 750 out of 24,000 votes.
In 1906 Sinclair decided to use some of his Jungle royalties into
establishing, Helicon
Home Colony,
a socialist community at Eaglewood, New
Jersey. One of those who joined was Sinclair
Lewis, who was to be greatly influenced by Sinclair Upton's views
on politics and literature. Four months after it opened, a fire entirely
destroyed Helicon. Later, Sinclair blamed his political opponents
for the fire.
Sinclair's next few novels such as The
Overman
(1907), The
Metropolis
(1908), The
Moneychangers
(1908), Love's
Pilgrimage
(1911) and Sylvia
(1913) were commercially unsuccessful.
In 1914 Sinclair moved to Croton-on-Hudson, a small town close to
New York City where there was a substantial community of radicals
living including Max Eastman, Floyd
Dell, Robert Minor, Boardman
Robinson and Inez Milholland.
He also pleased his socialist friends with his anthology of social
protest, The Cry
for Justice
(1915). John Reed wrote to Sinclair that his
"anthology has made more radicals than anything I ever heard
of".
Initially, members of the Socialist Party
had argued that the First World War had been
caused by the imperialist competitive system and were opposed to the
United States becoming involved in the conflict. However, news of
the atrocities carried out by German
soldiers in Belgium convinced some
members that the United States should join the Allies
against the Central Powers.
Sinclair took this view and began arguing this case in the radical
journal, The Masses. Its editor,
Max Eastman and John
Reed, who had been to the Western Front
and Eastern Front as a war reporter,
disagreed and argued against him in the journal. The issue split the
Socialist Party and eventually Sinclair
resigned from the party over it.
After the USA declared war on the Central
Powers in 1917 the Espionage Act
was passed and this resulted in several of Sinclair's socialist opponents,
being imprisoned for their opposition to the war. Sinclair now took
up their case and when Eugene Debs, was
imprisoned Sinclair wrote to Woodrow Wilson
arguing that it was "futile to try and win democracy abroad,
while we are losing it at home."
Sinclair continued to write political committed novels including King
Coal (1917) based on an industrial dispute and Boston
(1928) on the Sacco-Vanzetti Case. He also
wrote books about religion (The
Profits of Religion, 1918), newspapers (The
Brass Check, 1919) and education (The
Goose-Step, 1923 and The
Goslings, 1924).
Sinclair rejoined the Socialist Party
and in 1926 was its candidate to become governor of California. The
following year he wrote an article for The
Nation where he admitted he had been wrong about the First
World War.
In 1934 Sinclair once again stood as a candidate to become governor
of California. He lost, but his EPIC program (End Poverty in California)
gained considerable support and this time he won 879,537 votes against
the winner's 1,138,620.
In 1940 World's End
launched Sinclair's 11 volume novel series on American government.
His novel Dragon's Teeth
(1942) on the rise of Nazism won him the Pulitzer
Prize. By the time Upton Sinclair died in
November, 1968, he had published more than ninety books.
(1)
In American Outpost, Upton Sinclair explained the writing of
his first successful novel, The Jungle.
I wrote with tears and anguish, pouring into the pages all that pain
which life had meant to me. Externally the story had to do with a
family of stockyard workers, but internally it was the story of my
own family. Did I wish to know how the poor suffered in winter time
in Chicago? I only had to recall the previous winter in the cabin,
when we had only cotton blankets, and had rags on top of us. It was
the same with hunger, with illness, with fear. Our little boy was
down with pneumonia that winter, and nearly died, and the grief of
that went into the book.
(2)
Upton Sinclair, Cosmopolitan (October, 1906)
What life means to me is to put the content of Shelley into the form
of Zola. The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks
no more of "art for art's sake" than a man on a sinking
ship thinks of painting a beautiful picture in the cabin; he thinks
of getting ashore - and then there will be time enough for art.
(3)
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906)
It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the department
of Elzbieta. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute flyers,
and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in
a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention
paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way
back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was
moldy and white - it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and
dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption.
There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt
and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions
of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in
rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands
of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places
to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat
and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were
nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them;
they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers
together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled
into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to
lift out a rat even when he saw one - there were things that went
into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.
There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate
their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water
that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of
smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends
of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels
in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which
the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do
once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste
barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt
and rust and old nails and stale water - and cartload after cartload
of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat,
and sent out to the public's breakfast. Some of it they would make into "smoked" sausage
but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, they would
call upon their chemistry department, and preserve it with borax and
color it with gelatine to make it brown. All of their sausage came
out of the same bowl, but when they came to wrap it they would stamp
some of it "special," and for this they would charge two
cents more a pound.
(4)
Upton Sinclair, in an interview with Rene Fulop-Miller (24th March,
1923)
I am a person who has never used violence himself. My present opinion
is that people who have obtained the ballot should use it and solve
their problems in that way. In the case of peoples who have not obtained
the ballot, and who cannot control their states, I again find in my
own mind a division of opinion, which is not logical, but purely a
rough practical judgment. My own forefathers got their political freedom
by violence; that is to say, they overthrew the British crown and
made themselves a free Republic. Also by violence they put an end
to the enslavement of the black race on this continent.
(5)
Upton Sinclair, letter to the Anti-Enlistment League (20th September,
1915)
I
know you are brave and unselfish people, making sacrifices for a great
principle but I cannot join you. I believe in the present effort which
the allies are making to suppress German militarism. I would approve
of America going to their assistance. I would enlist to that end,
if ever there be a situation where I believe I could do more with
my hands than I could with my pen.
(6)
Upton Sinclair, letter of resignation from the Socialist
Party (September, 1917)
I have lived in Germany and know its
language and literature, and the spirit and ideals of its rulers.
Having given many years to a study of American capitalism. I am not
blind to the defects of my own country; but, in spite of these defects,
I assert that the difference between the ruling class of Germany and
that of America is the difference between the seventeenth century
and the twentieth.
No question can be settled by force, my pacifist friends all say.
And this in a country in which a civil war was fought and the question
of slavery and secession settled! I can speak with especial certainty
of this question, because all my ancestors were Southerners and fought
on the rebel side; I myself am living testimony to the fact that force
can and does settle questions - when it is used with intelligence.
In the same way I say if Germany be allowed to win this war - then
we in America shall have to drop every other activity and devote the
next twenty or thirty years to preparing for a last-ditch defence
of the democratic principle.
(7)
Upton Sinclair, letter to John Reed (22nd
October, 1918)
American capitalism is predatory,
and American politics are corrupt: The same thing is true in England
and the same in France; but in all these three countries the dominating
fact is that whatever the people get ready to change the government,
they can change it. The same thing is not true of Germany, and until
it was made true in Germany, there could be no free political democracy
anywhere else in the world - to say nothing of any free social democracy.
My revolutionary friends who will not recognize this fact seem to
me like a bunch of musicians sitting down to play a symphony concert
in a forest where there is a man-eating tiger lose. For my part, much
as I enjoy symphony concerts, I want to put my fiddle away in its
case and get a rifle and go out and settle with the tiger.
(8)
Upton
Sinclair, The Brass Check (1919)
In
the course of my twenty years career as an assailant of special privilege,
I have attacked pretty nearly every important interest in America.
The statements I have made, if false, would have been enough to deprive
me of a thousand times all the property I ever owned, and to have
sent me to prison for a thousand times a normal man's life. I have
been called a liar on many occasions, needless to say; but never once
in all these twenty years has one of my enemies ventures to bring
me into a court of law, and to submit the issue between us to a jury
of American citizens.
(9)
Upton Sinclair, letter to the Los Angeles Police Chief (7th April,
1928)
I
am not a giant physically; I shrink from pain and filth and vermin
and foul air, like any other man of refinement; also, I freely admit
that when I see a line of a hundred policeman with drawn revolvers
flung across a street to keep anyone from coming on to private property
to hear my feeble voice. But I have a conscience and a religious faith,
and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering, and
may be lost again through our cowardice.
(10)
Upton Sinclair, Boston (1928)
There was John Dos Passos, faithful son of Harvard,
and John Howard Lawson, another one of the 'New Playwrights' from Greenwich Village. There was Clarina Michelson, ready to do the
hard work again, and William Patterson, a Negro lawyer from New York, running the greatest risk of any of them, with
his black face not to be disguised. Just up Beacon Street was the Shaw Monument, with figures in perennial bronze, of
unmistakable Negro boys in uniforms, led by a young Boston blueblood
on horseback; no doubt Patterson had looked at this, and drawn courage
from it. ...
The trooper speeds on;
he has spied the black face, and wants that most of all. The Negro
runs, and the rider rears the front of his steed, intending to strike
him down with the iron-shod hoofs. But fortunately there is a tree,
and the Negro leaps behind it; and a man can run around a tree faster
than the best-trained police-mount - the dapper and genial William
Patterson proves it by making five complete circuits before he runs
into the arms of an ordinary cop, who grabs him by the collar and
tears off his sign and tramples it in the dirt, and then starts to
march him away. 'Well,' he remarks sociably, 'This is the first time
I ever see a nigger bastard that was a communist.' The lawyer is surprised,
because he has been given to understand that that particular word
is barred from the Common. Mike Crowley was so shocked, two weeks
ago, when Mary Donovan tacked up a sign to a tree: 'Did you see what
I did to those anarchistic bastards? - Judge Thayer.' But apparently
the police did not have to obey their own laws.
(11)
Sinclair
Lewis, wrote a letter to Upton Sinclair where he pointed out a
long list of factual inaccuracies in his book,
Money Writes!,
(3rd January, 1928)
I did not want to say these unpleasant things,
but you have written to me, asking my opinion, and I give it to you,
flat. If you would get over two ideas - first that any one who criticizes
you is an evil and capitalist-controlled spy, and second that you
have only to spend a few weeks on any subject to become a master of
it - you might yet regain your now totally lost position as the leader
of American socialistic journalism.
(12)
The Nation, review of Oil
(5th December, 1927)
What Fielding was to the eighteenth century and Dickens to the nineteenth.
Sinclair is to our own. The overwhelming knowledge and passionate
expression of specific wrongs are more stirring, more interesting,
and also more taxing than the cynical censure of Fielding and the
sentimental lamentations of Dickens.
(13)
Arthur Conan Doyle, Our African Winter (1929)
I look upon Upton Sinclair as one of the greatest novelists in the
world, the Zola of America.
(14)
H.
L. Mencken, letter to Upton
Sinclair published in The American Mercury (June,
1936)
You protest, and with justice, each time Hitler
jails an opponent; but you forget that Stalin and company have jailed
and murdered a thousand times as many. It seems to me, and indeed
the evidence is plain, that compared to the Moscow brigands and assassins.
Hitler is hardly more than a common Ku Kluxer and Mussolini almost
a philanthropist.
(15)
George Bernard Shaw, (12th December, 1941)
I
have regarded you, not as a novelist, but as an historian; for it
is my considered opinion, unshaken at 85, that records of fact are
not history. They are only annals, which cannot become historical
until the artist-poet-philosopher rescues them from the unintelligible
chaos of their actual occurrence and arranges them in works of art.
When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime I do not
refer them to the newspaper files and to the authorities, but to your
novels. The object that the people in your books never existed; that
their deeds were never done and their sayings never uttered. I assure
them that they were, except that Upton Sinclair individualized and
expressed them better than they could have done, and arranged their
experiences, which as they actually occurred were as unintelligible
as pied type, in significant and intelligible order.
(16)
Upton Sinclair, letter to Norman Thomas
(25th September, 1951)
The
American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label.
I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC. Running on the Socialist
ticket I got 60,000 votes, and running on the slogan to 'End Poverty
in California' I got 879,000. I think we simply have to recognize
the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie.
There is no use attacking it by a front attack, it is much better
to out-flank them.
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