Happy Birthday Upton Sinclair!

“The shriek was followed by another, louder and yet more agonizing..for once started upon that journey, the hog never came back. One by one the men hooked up the hogs and slit their throats. There was a line of hogs with squeals and lifeblood ebbing away.. until at last each vanished into a huge vat of boiling water (some still alive). The hogs were so innocent. They came so very trustingly. They were so very human in their protests. They had done nothing to deserve it.” from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

Happy Birthday wishes go out to author, socialist, and human rights activist Upton Sinclair, who was born on this date in 1878.

Sinclair was a self-avowed muckraker and his most famous novel, The Jungle is certainly full of muck – and blood, and pus, and offal, and excrement, and human misery all ground up and packaged as food.

The Jungle tells the story of Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who works in the stockyards. Rudkis is a honest man and a hard worker, but his life and vitality are slowly sucked out of him, leaving him a dried husk of a man until he finds salvation in the Socialist Party.

Sinclair wanted The Jungle to expose the human costs of capitalism but it was his vivid and stomach-churning descriptions of the stockyards that grabbed America’s attention. His vivid desriptions of the Chicago meatpacking plants disgusted millions of readers and led Theodore Roosevelt to sign the Pure Food and Drug Act. Sinclair would later lament: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

The American National Biography, an exploration of American history through the lives of the men and women who shaped the nation, has a great entry on Upton Sinclair which you can read below.:

Sinclair, Upton (20 Sept. 1878-25 Nov. 1968), novelist, reformer, and politician, was born Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr., in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Upton Beall Sinclair, Sr., a wholesale liquor salesman, and Priscilla Harden. Sinclair’s father was irresponsible and alcoholic and left the boy’s care to his mother, who encouraged him to read.

In 1886 or 1887 the family moved to New York City, where in 1889 Sinclair attended public school classes for the first time. During the next two years he completed eight elementary grades and in 1892 enrolled in the City College of New York. In 1894 he began to sell jokes and puzzles to children’s periodicals and a year later was selling stories to juvenile magazines to support himself.

He graduated from City College with a B.A. in 1897, abandoned an ambition to become a lawyer, and enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University, all the while writing almost a hundred “half-dime” novels for Street and Smith, America’s leading pulp-fiction publisher. Attracted to courses in music, contemporary politics, and poetry, especially that of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sinclair decided to become an influential man of letters. In May 1900 he left Columbia without a graduate degree, rented a cabin for three months in southern Quebec, and wrote an idealistic novel, Springtime and Harvest. In October of that year he married Meta H. Fuller in New York.

Unable to find a publisher for his novel, Sinclair borrowed money from an uncle and issued it himself in 1901, but he barely recouped his expenses. Republished commercially as King Midas (1901), the novel still failed. Its message, that beauty and poetry in a marriage are more important than mere sex, deluded and later embarrassed Sinclair, the birth of whose one child in 1901 also displeased him. In 1902 he joined the Socialist party. A year later he moved with his family to the countryside just outside Princeton, New Jersey. His next published novel, The Journal of Arthur Stirling (1903), a “spiritual autobiography,” was billed by him as the diary of a real-life poet who committed suicide in New York, but the hoax was soon exposed. In 1903 Sinclair also published Prince Hagen, a novel about a Nibelung who with access to secret gold opposes his greed to Wall Street’s. Its message is that humanity’s ills cross political and religious lines and can be eradicated only by an idealistic worship of beauty. The failure of these novels reinforced Sinclair’s belief in secular socialism, which he found more acceptable than Christian capitalism as a solution to human woes.

Millionaire-socialist George D. Herron subsidized Sinclair while he wrote Manassas: A Novel of the War (1904), a well-researched novel combining history and politics. Its hero, Allan Montague, meets John Brown, Jefferson Davis, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and other Civil War-era figures and is indoctrinated into the neo-abolitionist socialism by a German refugee soldier. Although better than Sinclair’s earlier novels, Manassas sold just as poorly.

In 1904 Sinclair published several articles in Appeal to Reason, a populist-socialist weekly, whose editor challenged him to follow his account of nineteenth-century “chattel slaves” in Manassas with a novel about twentieth-century “wage slaves.” With that purpose in mind, Sinclair went to Chicago to observe the business practices of the beef trust. There greedy capitalist owners of slaughterhouses and meat factories paid farmers and ranchers low prices for livestock and held down workers’ wages; they condoned crooked foremen, permitted unspeakably unsanitary conditions, loaned their own refrigerated cars to the railroads, and demanded special freight rates, all the while corrupting city politicians. Appalled, Sinclair returned to New Jersey and started a novel based on what he saw, The Jungle, which the Appeal serialized beginning in February 1905.

That summer he and his friend Jack London and several other socialists in New York City founded the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (later called the League for Industrial Democracy), which attracted important liberal Americans. Sinclair resumed writing The Jungle and, after finding a publisher (Doubleday, Page) for the book, completed the last third of the manuscript.

The Jungle narrates the miseries of Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who works in the stockyards. After marrying and having a son, he is injured and loses his job. Taking to drink, he attacks a man who has led Rudkus’s wife into prostitution to support the family; the assault results in his being jailed. When Rudkus’s wife dies and their son drowns, he returns to work and is injured again, turns to crime, scabs during a strike, chances to attend a socialist meeting, and finds secular salvation in working toward a socialistic utopia. Sinclair’s plot, apart from brilliantly dramatizing poor people’s communal life, including an occasional picnic and vivid marriage ceremonies, is less significant than his horrifying depiction of working conditions in the meat-packing industry. Slaughtering techniques were dangerous; cattle were processed even when diseased; dangerous chemicals were carelessly used; floors ran with blood and human and rat waste; and human mutilations, blood poisoning, and other injuries and illnesses were common. Published in February 1906, The Jungle was internationally influential; a British edition and seventeen translations soon followed.

President Theodore Roosevelt invited Sinclair to lunch in the White House and in June signed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act–for which Sinclair’s book was primarily responsible. Despite the passage of the act, The Jungle induced thousands of Americans to become vegetarians for decades thereafter. (Adding to its impact, the novel was made into a movie eight years after its publication.) The rest of Sinclair’s long life, though fascinating and varied, was in a sense anticlimactic.

In October 1906 Sinclair used most of his $30,000 in Jungle royalties to build Helicon Colony, a communal living venture, in Englewood, New Jersey, but a fire destroyed the establishment four months later. His immense popularity enabled Sinclair to pour out books, though rarely with much financial gain. A Captain of Industry, a novel finished in 1903 but published in 1906, features a money-corrupted industrialist swept off his yacht, drowned, and mangled by an inimical nature. The Industrialist Republic (1907) foolishly projects America’s happy turn to socialism under President William Randolph Hearst beginning in 1913. Another novel published in 1907 but written some years before, The Overman, was inspired by Sinclair’s reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra in German. It features a self-contained genius who lives on a desert island and composes in his head tragically ecstatic music. Two more novels were published in 1908: Metropolis castigates New York’s high society; The Moneychangers portrays the fiscal chicanery of a “hero” patterned on J. P. Morgan.

From 1908 to 1914 Sinclair restlessly moved about, enjoyed California, flirted with single-tax theorists in Alabama and Delaware, checked into clinics in Michigan more than once for depression, visited Europe and met fellow socialists (including George Bernard Shaw), sought publicity at every turn, and wrote essays on capitalism, dieting, marriage, education, tourism, and pacifism. His prolific output of books did not abate, even as the circumstances of his personal life changed. His novel of 1910, Samuel the Seeker, ridicules capitalists and churchmen and praises socialism. In 1912, after having embarrassingly fictionalized his childhood and marriage in Love’s Pilgrimage (1911), he divorced his wife for promiscuity long tolerated. A year later he married Mary Craig Kimbrough (with whom he did not have children). Soon after the marriage, he published the novel Damaged Goods (1913), which depicts the dangers of venereal disease. Two other novels, Sylvia (1913) and Sylvia’s Marriage (1914), are based on events in his new wife’s earlier life.

Sinclair’s social conscience continued to find new causes to pursue. In 1914, to support the coal miners’ bloody strike in Ludlow, Colorado, Sinclair had himself arrested for picketing outside the New York offices of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who controlled the mines and who later praised Sinclair for his courage and beneficial influence. (Rockefeller went to Ludlow, visited miners, danced with their wives, recognized the union, and helped improve working conditions.) Three years later, now living in California, Sinclair published King Coal, a muckraking, pro-union novel based on the “coal war,” but it also sold poorly, for by this time the war in Europe was a more absorbing concern. In that same year, 1917, the former advocate of pacifism resigned from the Socialist party to protest its nonintervention policy. But Sinclair did not renounce his liberal impulses, as illustrated by his cogent, anticonservative letters to President Woodrow Wilson concerning American shipping, censorship, the treatment of conscientious objectors, and Russia’s future. During the war Sinclair corresponded with and personally helped many oppressed fellow liberals, including Eugene V. Debs, Max Eastman, Michael Gold, and John Reed, whether he agreed precisely with their opinions or not. To argue his position he produced his own quickly insolvent magazine, Upton Sinclair’s (1918-1919).

Between 1918 and 1928 Sinclair published seventeen books. Six were iconoclastic, nonfiction works focusing on the continued ills of America and constituted what he called his “Dead Hand” series, the hand being capitalism, a strangling influence on one American liberty after another. The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic Interpretation (1918) castigates churches as moneymaking, politicized predators; its partial validity is lost by excessive stress on Catholic “plotting” and Jewish “Shylocks.” The Brass Check (1919) deplores procapitalistic editorial censorship in the press. The Goose-Step (1923) describes the commercializing of American higher education, and The Goslings (1924) examines the same process affecting grade school and high school education. Mammonart (1925) theorizes that through the ages most artists have served their respective economic establishments. Money Writes! A Study of American Literature (1927) criticizes recent writers for not being politically radical. Sinclair published these books, often disfigured by socialistic propagandizing and highly personal rantings, at his own expense; some were also picked up by commercial firms. All six were influential, and The Brass Check became a bestseller. Of his five novels during these years, only Oil! (1927) and Boston (2 vols., 1928) are of enduring value. Oil! deals in general with the California petroleum business and in particular with the 1924 Teapot Dome scandal during President Warren Harding’s administration. The book sold better after it was banned in Boston for incidentally mentioning birth control. (Margaret Sanger, the controversial advocate of family planning, was one of Sinclair’s close friends.) Boston was inspired by the 1927 executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the Italian immigrant anarchists convicted of a 1920 payroll robbery and murder in Braintree, Massachusetts, but whose guilt seemed to many not at all certain. The case outraged American liberals and resulted in many poems, plays, short stories, and novels, of which Boston is among the very best. To prepare for it, Sinclair interviewed Vanzetti–and judged him to be innocent. He placed the two Italian prisoners at the center of a sprawling work involving Bostonians of several social and financial levels and rebuked the entire conservative establishment.

In the 1930s Sinclair the writer faltered: his Mental Radio (1930) concerns mental telepathy, while in The Wet Parade (1931) he praises Prohibition. Sinclair the politician came to the fore. In 1933 he published I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty to advance his 1934 gubernatorial bid as a Democratic candidate with EPIC–End Poverty in California–as his battle cry. He campaigned vigorously, in part by making effective radio broadcasts. But his opponent smeared him as a free-love communist, and he lost, although many of his left-wing suggestions, including state ownership of certain industries to ameliorate statewide unemployment, earned him almost 44 percent of the slightly more than 2 million votes cast and influenced President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s federal policies. As usual, Sinclair quickly sought to justify his political position in both fiction and nonfiction. Three novels of this period are notable: The Flivver King (1937), attacking Henry Ford <../10/10-00578.html?from=../16/16-01510.html&from_nm=Sinclair%2C%20Upton>’s antiunion policies; No Pasaran! (1937), featuring an American fighting with the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War; and Little Steel (1938), rebuking the big steel companies’ hatred of labor unions.

Now followed the Lanny Budd series of eleven novels, for which–along with The Jungle, Oil!, and Boston–Sinclair will be remembered the longest. The Budd titles are World’s End (1940, a Literary Guild selection), Between Two Worlds (1941), Dragon’s Teeth (1942, a 1943 Pulitzer Prize winner), Wide Is the Gate (1943), Presidential Agent (1944), Dragon Harvest (1945), A World to Win (1946, a bestseller), Presidential Mission (1947), One Clear Call (1948), O, Shepherd, Speak! (1949), and The Return of Lanny Budd (1953). This monumental series, totaling 7,014 pages, vivifies contemporary history, in exciting narrative form, from 1913 to the beginning of the Cold War in 1949 and beyond, through the eyes of one observer, who is also a participant. Sinclair did not plan a sequel when he introduced in World’s End Lanny Budd, the illegitimate son of a rich American munitions maker and an internationally famous beauty. But over the years Budd evolved into an art dealer, Roosevelt’s secret agent, and a smooth lover. Like Allan Montague of Manassas, Budd encounters many historical figures of his time, among them Isadora Duncan, Albert Einstein, Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong), Marshal Pétain, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Stalin, Lincoln Steffens, Woodrow Wilson, and Sir Basil Zaharoff. Sinclair researched his topics with great diligence. He even wrote a thousand or more letters to important persons with specific queries, received many detailed answers, and was also aided by unsolicited correspondents. The result may have been fodder for adverse critics, one of whom said that Budd combined the traits of d’Artagnan (the fourth Musketeer), Sherlock Holmes, the British dandy Beau Brummell, the actor Douglas Fairbanks, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, and Casanova.

Millions of readers, however, enjoyably learned their history from the Lanny Budd series, which was also relished by such discerning readers as President Lyndon B. Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird, and Hugh Sidey, Washington correspondent for Time, both of whom freely admitted as much. Sinclair’s romantic hope, though not his realistic expectation, was that his Lanny Budd series, corny but coherent, as one reviewer put it, would encourage the masses to espouse socialism without the taint of communism. Always antifascist, Sinclair was also never a communist, although for decades he was friendly with and supported many communists and preferred many of their beliefs to those of capitalists–even after he grew aware of Stalin’s atrocities. The final Lanny Budd volume, however, reflects a shift to anticommunism and to a measured pro-American position.

The last decade of Sinclair’s life was marked by a slowing of his literary production, many accolades, and changes in his personal affairs. He updated American Outpost, his 1932 autobiography, with My Lifetime in Letters (1960) and The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (1962), the latter a frank, rollicking work. In 1959 his wife Mary Craig Sinclair published her autobiography, Southern Belle, mostly about her childhood but also often lauding Sinclair. She died two years later, and the following year Sinclair married Mary “May” Elizabeth Willis, a great-grandmother, age seventy-nine. May predeceased him by three years. Optimistic and exuberant to swarms of admirers, Sinclair died in a nursing home near Bound Brook, New Jersey.

During his long, productive life Sinclair was a rebellious literary and political voice for progressive movements, a muckraker whose realistic fiction prompted legislative action, a candidate for important political office seeking radical change to improve the lot of capitalism’s victims, and the author of a multivolume novel the effect of which was to teach history to millions of readers unwilling to tackle their history straight. His direct and easy style, often lapsing into the quick and shallow, appeals to such readers. Above all Sinclair sought to lessen the ever dangerous gap between the wealthy and those ground down by poverty in his native land, which he loved enough to want it to be more humane.

Robert L. Gale