his boyhood’s ideals; and it was heard by a Socialist editor and
lecturer named George D. Herron--a gentle ex-clergyman, a man much
lied about at the time in the newspapers, which chose to represent
a divorce and re-marriage of his as a “free-love” arrangement, so
that he was a notorious figure and in public esteem a monster of
iniquity. It was he who subsidized the young author during the period
of his hardest struggles, and it was his influence which led him to
read Socialist books and listen to Socialist arguments. There ensued
a swift conversion; for the young man badly needed a new ideal to
live by, in the place of the one which life had so rudely shattered;
and the Socialist philosophy was peculiarly suited to his needs.
His scientific interests, his acceptance of the Darwinian ideas of
evolution, his repudiation of the church and of mysticism, his interest
in history and belief in the democratic ideal, his sense of justice and
abhorrence of a class society, his Utopian tendencies, his conception
of himself as a rebel and revolutionist, had half prepared him for the
new philosophy of Socialism; nothing, indeed, had stood in its way
except the doctrine, centering about his own personal ambitions, of
literature as the determining influence in human progress: and once
he had given up his poetic ambitions, it would not prove difficult
for him to dethrone literature from the supreme place he had assigned
it, in favor of humbler material factors, as required by the Marxian
theory. It was not, he now perceived, literature that made life, but
life that made literature; it was, on the whole, the way men made
their living that determined their thought, including their sense of
right and wrong. What, then, he had found wrong with the world was
due fundamentally to its economic arrangements; and these economic
arrangements were in their very nature, according to the Marxian
reading of history, temporary; this present period of capitalism was
a passing phase in mankind’s conquest of its environment. It would be
destroyed by its own machinery; for the machine method of production
brought into existence a larger and larger class of wage-workers,
whose interests were necessarily inimical to those of the class which
lived on profits and dividends; and when these workers had learned the
lesson that they had nothing to lose but their chains and a world to
gain, in the words of the _Communist Manifesto_, they would unite
for revolutionary purposes, destroy capitalism, and create a workers’
commonwealth all over the world. He conceived this, in accordance with
the somewhat mild Socialist ideas of that period, as an essentially
peaceful process, to be brought about by voting the Socialist ticket;
the votes being influenced by “agitation”, in which a writer who had
the good of the world at heart could find an honorable and useful and
sufficiently important field for the exercise of his talents.... But,
truly more important than all this, so far as his development as a
writer is concerned, was that aspect of the Socialist philosophy which
gave, to one who had always feared and hated the world, some realistic
means of discriminating among its values, so that he could more freely
and fearlessly enter into an imaginative intimacy with it in all its
crude detail. His old ethico-artistic theory of life, which had held
him in imagination at as great a distance as possible from raw life,
and had permitted him imaginatively to entertain life’s welter only in
the highly sublimated form of precept and principle, had thereby played
him false both in love and in art, had fooled and cheated him on every
hand. This new theory of life, finding order in the very midst of what
had been an unintelligible chaos, made him braver and bolder in his
imaginative approach to human experience; it enabled him to see beauty
where before there had been only ugliness, and it is ultimately to the
bracing influences of this new philosophy that we owe his development
into a great realistic novelist.
His nearness to the Socialist philosophy is apparent in _Prince
Hagen_, written in 1901--a spirited and amusing though too obviously
didactic satirical fable, in which a Nibelung out of Wagnerian opera
comes to New York and pursues an instructive career in Democratic and
Republican politics, high society, and finance, and then proposes to
take back to the Nibelungs the benefits, already set forth in somewhat
Shavian terms, of Christianity and capitalism. It was published in
1903, and dedicated to his Socialist friend, Dr. Herron. But its
criticism of the world was his own--not Marx’s.
II.
He had planned a novel of the Civil War--a trilogy, in fact--to be
called _The American_. It was announced under that title in the
_Independent_ article, where he spoke of the Civil War as “to me
the greatest art-theme now unpre-empted”, “one of the most tremendous
efforts of the human spirit in all history”, and declared that he hoped
to give “the next four or five years” to the task. This projected work
had also been described in _The Journal of Arthur Stirling_:
The world is filled with historical fiction; it is the cant and
sham of the hour.--Bah!
--This is what I long to do; to take the agony of that struggle and
live it and forge it into an artwork; to put upon a canvas the soul
of it....
I saw some of it to-day, and it made my blood go!
I saw a poet, young, sensitive, throbbing at the old, old wrong,
at the black shame of our history; I saw him drawn into that
fearful whirlpool of blood and passion, driven mad with the pain
and the horror of it; and I saw him drilled and hammered to a grim
savageness, saw him fighting, day by day, with his spirit, forging
it into an iron sword of war. He was haggard and hollow-eyed,
hard, ruthless, desperate.... I saw a man, wild and war-frenzied,
riding a war-frenzied horse; he rode at the head of a squadron,
bare-headed, sword in hand, demon-like--thundering down-hill upon
a mass of men, stabbing, slashing, trampling, scattering! Above
the roar of it all I heard his cry: “Finish it! Finish it!”
And afterward he staggered from his horse and knelt by the men he
had killed, and wept.
--I saw him again. It was when the man of the hour had come at
last; when the monster had met his master; when, day by day, they
hammered it ...; when they closed with it in death-grapple in a
tangled wilderness, where armies fought like demons in the dark,
and the wounded were burned by the thousands. I saw companies of
fainting, starving, agonized men retreating, still battling, day
by day; and I saw the wild horseman galloping on their track,
slashing, trampling--and still with the battle-yell: “Finish it!
Finish it!”
I saw him yet a third time. It was done, it was finished; and he
lay wounded in a dark room, listening. Outside in the streets of
Washington a great endless army marched by, the army of victory,
of salvation; and the old war-flags waved, and the old war-songs
echoed, and he heard the trampling of ten thousand feet....
The first volume of this projected trilogy appeared in 1904, under
the title _Manassas: A Novel of the War_. As written, under the
sobering influence of the new philosophy that had intervened in the
meantime, it is by no means so rhetorical a work as might have been
expected from these announcements. It is, in fact, his first realistic
novel. It is at the same time beautiful. Its many-cadenced and never
negligent prose bends tenderly or humorously over the most minute
details of everyday life, and rises with a mature magnificence to the
height of the most chaotic battle-scenes, never once losing its grip on
reality. It impresses one, re-reading it after many years, as a great
war-novel. It has its special limitation, sufficiently characteristic
of the author in this transition phase: sex does not exist for its
hero; but that limitation, ridiculous enough in afterthought, does
not count against it as much as might be supposed. Politics fill that
foreground of emotional interest usually occupied in fiction by women,
and so profoundly passionate are these political emotions that one
scarcely notices, and does not resent, the substitution. The hero
is a Southern youth who goes to visit relatives up North, becomes
interested in the Abolition agitation, becomes gradually a convert and
an enthusiast, and, when the war begins, enlists in a Boston regiment
that is mobbed in passing through Baltimore on its way to Washington,
and takes part in the great defeat of Northern arms at Manassas, where
the book ends. Its historical background is marvelously sketched in;
and, though it may be a heretical taste, it is possible to prefer its
battle-scenes to those of _The Red Badge of Courage_, or, indeed,
to anything short of Byron’s in _Don Juan_ and Tolstoy’s in _War
and Peace_. Jack London, it may be remarked, called it “the best
Civil War book I’ve read”.
But it is interesting not only as a novel, but as a memorial of a
private struggle of his own. It is not for merely literary reasons
that a child of the South goes over to the traditional enemy. The
aristocratic South, the old South, was still alive in him; it was
the South in him that, in spite of all his efforts to be modern and
scientific and democratic, still gave him that unconsciously lordly
attitude toward life. He had only changed its terminology and not
its essence when, as a Prince of the Kingdom of the Spirit, as a
poet-aristocrat, he had demanded of the world his rightful place in the
seats of spiritual rulership of mankind. When he hated the South, as he
had done since boyhood, it was something in himself that he hated. And
now, when he had cast off these lordly pretensions that had only gained
him mockeries and injuries, and sunk his own aspirations toward freedom
and happiness in those of the masses of workingmen, now more than ever
he needed to free himself from his Southern heritage. It was for that
reason that he fought the Civil War over again in his imagination. In
the person of his hero he had to make war on the South; the slavery of
black men was his pretext--it was himself that must be set free, before
he could go on to write the new books that called to him....
The rest of the trilogy was never written. In the fall of 1904, he went
to Chicago to get material for a book about Packingtown. He worked
there seven weeks, came back with his imagination aflame, and--pausing
in 1905 to found the Intercollegiate Socialist Society[11]--wrote a
book that changed his whole literary career.
X. THE JUNGLE
I.
In 1905 there began to appear, in a Socialist weekly, the _Appeal
to Reason_, published in Girard, Kansas, a novel of the Chicago
stockyards, by an almost altogether unknown writer: _The Jungle_,
by Upton Sinclair. I can remember, as a boy of eighteen, reading in my
_Appeal_ that first chapter describing the wedding party of Jurgis
and Ona, and my delight in the rich, full-blooded humanity of that
scene. It was the happy prelude to what was to be, as week after week
the story unrolled itself, a tragic panorama of working-class life,
true, terrible, and magnificent....
The story was simple enough; it related the fortunes of a group of
immigrants who lived and worked in the stockyards district--their
struggle to get ahead, to own a home, to bring up their children
decently, while all the time they are brutally exploited, preyed
upon, robbed, outraged, by the unscrupulous forces which find in
their poverty and ignorance and helplessness mere opportunities for
enrichment. The group is crushed, one by one, in the struggle; the
old men are thrown on the scrapheap to starve, the women are drawn
into prostitution to keep body and soul together, the children die;
Jurgis himself goes to prison for smashing the face of a brutal boss,
and when he comes out his little world had been destroyed as if by an
earthquake--and he is left to wander, getting wisdom as he wanders,
and coming at last to believe in a Socialist reconstruction of this
hideous world. At every point the story is enriched by the most vivid
and relentless realistic detail; one is immersed in the filth and
stench and cruelty of the stockyards, and one feels the sublime human
aspirations which even there burn unquenchably in humble hearts.
For a while the knowledge that a great new novelist had appeared in
America was almost confined to the readers of that Socialist weekly--no
small audience, however, for the “_Appeal_ army” of enthusiastic
subscription-getters had drummed up half a million readers for that
publication. The first public, therefore, of this astonishing novel,
was of farmers resting in stocking feet beside the stove of winter
evenings, and of discontented workingmen in a thousand cities and
towns--an audience which, whether rural or urban, understood the
truths of human suffering which it so vividly portrayed. That was its
first success--its recognition and acclaim by a proletarian audience.
Then came recognition by fellow-writers, who heard of this strange
and powerful novel being published in a Socialist weekly, and sent
for back numbers. David Graham Phillips wrote to the author: “I never
expected to read a serial. I am reading _The Jungle_ and I should
be afraid to trust myself to tell you how it affects me. It is a great
work. I have a feeling that you yourself will be dazed some day by
the excitement about it. It is impossible that such a power should not
be felt. It is so simple, so true, so tragic, and so human. It is so
eloquent, and yet so exact.” And, of course, Jack London, his comrade
in the Socialist movement, did not fail to acclaim this achievement.
“The _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ of wage slavery”, he called it; and with
that legend on the jacket and in the advertisements it was brought
before the general American public in book form in 1906. It was an
immediate and enormous success. It became a “bestseller” in America,
England and the British colonies. It was translated into seventeen
languages, and the world became aware that industrial America in its
toil, its misery and its hope had found a voice.
II.
But the literary sensation in America had already become secondary to
the shock of its readers in learning of the conditions under which
their meats were prepared in Packingtown, not as affecting the workers
but as affecting their own health--for the story dealt incidentally
with the use of condemned meat. The author later remarked that he had
aimed at the public’s heart and by accident had hit it in the stomach.
His deepest concern had been with the fate of the workers, and he
realized with bitterness that he had become a celebrity not because the
public cared anything about the workers, but because it did not want to
eat diseased meat.
The public was more or less prepared for such charges against
the packers, on account of the “embalmed beef” scandal during the
Spanish-American war. President Roosevelt, responding to a widespread
popular demand, sent a commission to Chicago to make an investigation
of conditions in Packingtown. This commission was assisted, at
Sinclair’s expense, by Ella Reeve Bloor, who had been familiar with
conditions there and had helped him in his seven weeks’ investigation
preliminary to the writing of the novel; and the researches of this
commission appear to have confirmed the chief charges made in the book.
The young novelist accepted, as a Socialist, the opportunity which this
situation provided for agitation. But the packers, and large business
interests in general, were aroused, and all their power and influence
was used to keep this agitation from reaching the public, and to
represent the young agitator as an irresponsible sensation-monger. He
set up a publicity bureau, worked twenty hours a day, wrote articles,
sent telegrams, and gave interviews to roomfuls of reporters; but so
thoroughly had the newspapers been mobilized by the business interests
as a medium of defense that the publicity he actually achieved for the
workers’ cause was slight; and on the other hand, his own reputation,
in genteel literary and critical circles, and among the public at
large, was seriously damaged. In the course of these efforts, President
Roosevelt said to him: “Mr. Sinclair, I have been in public life
longer than you, and I will give you this bit of advice; if you pay
any attention to what the newspapers say about you, you will have
an unhappy time.” He might have taken this as a warning that his
temperament was not suited to public life, for he could not get used to
being lied about in the newspapers; but he persisted in his efforts,
and he did have a very “unhappy time”.
Nothing in particular was done about the workers’ conditions. Even the
President’s meat-inspection law, as finally passed, had, in the opinion
of those behind it, all its teeth drawn first. Sinclair continued his
attempt to agitate the question, but the public had been reassured, and
the effort was futile. In _The Brass Check_, where the complete
story of this period is told vividly, he says: “I look back upon this
campaign, to which I gave three years of brain and soul sweat, and
ask what I really accomplished.” He had taken, he says, a few million
dollars away from the Chicago packers, “giving them to the Junkers of
East Prussia, and to the Paris bankers who were backing enterprises
to pack meat in the Argentine”. He had also added a hundred thousand
readers to the circulation of a popular magazine, which speedily
repudiated its early muck-raking habits and became a defender of big
business; and he had made a fortune for his publishers, who immediately
became conservative and devoted their profits from _The Jungle_ to
promote a kind of writing hostile to everything in which he believed....
III.
_The Jungle_ was in fact the climax of a literary movement in
America which had aroused the fear and anger of large business
interests. The great middle-class reform movement, marked in the
political field by the careers of Bryan, Roosevelt and the earlier
Wilson, had produced an audience sympathetic to the telling of
unpleasant truths about American political and business conditions.
In the magazine field this was called “muck-raking”; there were
sensational revelations of the inside workings of Wall Street by Tom
Lawson, of municipal corruption by Lincoln Steffens, of Standard Oil
history by Ida M. Tarbell, of Beef Trust finance by Ray Stannard Baker.
In the fictional field there was a corresponding literature, written
by such men as Robert Herrick, Frank Norris and David Graham Phillips.
This literature had its social revolutionary fringe: Jack London
was an avowed revolutionist, and such Socialist critics of society
as W. J. Ghent, John Spargo, Robert Hunter, Charles Edward Russell
and William English Walling, had a wide hearing. A professor named
Thorstein Veblen had written a devastating book called _The Theory
of the Leisure Class_, and phrases from it passed into general
intellectual currency. These conditions were sufficiently alarming, in
a country where every year, in one great industry or another, there
was a bitter struggle between employers and men, in which bullets
were the decisive factor. And now a young man, by writing a book, had
put a great industry on the defensive before the whole public. It
was necessary to tighten the grip of business upon the intellectual
world. The newspapers were already well in hand; but there was a group
of free magazines which were making money out of “muck-raking”--the
very center of the intellectual rebellion. Big business struck at
this group of free magazines, effectively, through the medium of
advertising. The magazine policies were changed. Writers were called
off from investigations of industrial conditions. An immense campaign
of optimism was begun, and a cheerful outlook upon American industrial
conditions was preached and made synonymous with patriotism. The
writers for the most part changed with the times, and adapted their
views to the new editorial demand; the others were silenced or
discouraged. A few prominent radical journalists, unable to tell the
truth any longer in the magazines, bought one of their own; but they,
too, presently succumbed to the spirit of the times.... Sinclair
quotes, in _The Brass Check_, the titles of some representative
articles from a recent issue of that once-daring magazine: “How We
Decide When to Raise a Man’s Salary”, “The Comic Side of Trouble”,
“Interesting People: A Wonderful Young Private Secretary”, “From
Prize-Fighter to Parson”....
The public, deprived of the intellectual stimulant of unpleasant truth
before it had quite got used to it, was easily trained in more cheerful
tastes. Those writers who sought to revive the art of muck-raking found
themselves with an indifferent audience. “People aren’t interested in
that sort of thing any more.” While as for fiction, the old genteel
tradition reasserted itself, the standard of non-controversiality
became identical with the standard of decency, and any author who dared
to violate this standard ran the risk of finding himself removed in
critical esteem beyond the pale of literary respectability.
The measure of the wrath of the masters of America and the docility
of its intellectual class during this period may be taken from the
Gorky incident, which happened in the spring of 1906, coincident
with the _Jungle_ agitation. The great Russian novelist, Maxim
Gorky, had come to America to raise funds for the cause of Russian
freedom--a cause long since made popular among even the respectable
American intelligentsia by the writings of the American journalist,
George Kennan. A great welcome was prepared for him. But it happened
that two radical union leaders, Moyer and Haywood, were on trial for
their lives in a Western state in the course of an industrial war
between the miners and the coal-barons. Their cause had been espoused
by the Socialists, who now asked Gorky to sign a telegram of sympathy
to Moyer and Haywood. He did so. A White House reception to Gorky was
immediately canceled. And then the American papers, at the instance of
the Czarist embassy, began to denounce Gorky, on the pretext that he
had “insulted” the American people by bringing with him as his wife
a woman to whom he was not married. It was known to those who made
the charge that Russian revolutionists married without the churchly
processes which alone were “legal” in Russia, and that Madame Andreieva
was his wife according to the revolutionary code; they had known that
all along, and had not made use of the fact. Now they unloosed upon
him the furies of a hypocritical moralistic journalism. He was hounded
out of New York hotels, denounced in pulpit and newspaper throughout
the country; his mission was destroyed. And the American men of letters
who had been proud to be invited to dine with this Russian giant, were
afraid to brave that storm: one and all, the respectable writers turned
tail and fled, not daring to call their souls their own--a black day
in the calendar of American letters. Great reputations fell that day,
Mark Twain’s among them, in the minds of boys and girls, now grown up,
who saw that humiliating and cowardly action with the clear eyes of
youth and were ashamed for their country. If American literature is now
less timid about sex, that young indignation may have something to do
with it. But those boys and girls did not know why America and American
men of letters had suddenly become so prudish: they did not know that
Maxim Gorky’s influence had been destroyed in that sudden journalistic
whirlwind, not because of the lack of churchly blessings upon his
union with Madame Andreieva, but because he had rashly intruded into
an American economic struggle on the unfashionable side. He, and the
writers of America, must be taught a lesson, and made to realize who
was running this country and what happened to anybody who tried to
interfere with them.