is a maturer work, and if it does not have the intensity and poignancy
of that early masterpiece it has a greater breadth of vision and a
deeper knowledge of life. Its curiosity and range and ease and power
are Tolstoyan. It is a large book, a great canvas, as great as that
of the great pamphlets, and carrying all their effects easily within
its simple story. It is the story of Oil, in human terms, and in terms
of all classes--the oil magnates and their families, the rich, the
poor, the workers, idlers, the doll-house life of Hollywood, and the
political machinations that have been reverberating through America for
the last four years: it is all here, in the story of an oil magnate’s
son, his father, his sweethearts, and his friends, including the vital
figure of Paul, the young workingman who gives him his first glimpse
into the rebel world beneath his happy paradise. No extended account
of it will be given in these last pages; it suffices to say that it
restores to us Upton Sinclair the novelist, and that it constitutes one
of the great achievements in the literary discovery of contemporary
America.
It is as though in the great pamphlets Upton Sinclair had found his
stride, and brought back to the medium of fiction the verve and the
reality which he had learned in dealing with life at close quarters.
If he can continue in this masterful way, not even his Socialist
preoccupations can prevent him from being recognized as America’s
greatest novelist.
II.
It remains only to complete the picture with some brief account of
his other activities, carrying the story of his life down to the
present.... Little has been said of him here as a playwright; but he
has written many plays, produced some of them himself under Socialist
auspices, and one of his late plays, _Singing Jailbirds_,
published in 1924, dealing with the ruthless persecution of the I. W.
W. under the California “Criminal Syndicalist” law, is a more poignant
and effective example of the expressionistic drama than any that has
been produced on the American stage. It has been played in England as a
means of raising funds for the striking miners, and last year in Vienna
on the revolutionary anniversary, November 8th and 9th. This remarkable
play is the outcome of the author’s experience in 1923, during the
free speech fight at Los Angeles in connection with the I. W. W.
harbor strike. The rights of free speech being illegally denied by the
police to the members of the I. W. W., he undertook to uphold the law
against those who, sworn to defend it, were engaged in violating it
in the interests of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association. He
and his associates, assembling in San Pedro on private property with
the consent of the owner, were arrested by the police for the crime of
reading aloud, and hearing read, three sentences from the Constitution
of the United States--those guaranteeing “freedom of speech and of
the press, and the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to
petition the government for the redress of their grievances.” The
act of reminding the people of California of these antique rights as
guaranteed in that venerable document constituted a crime which made
Sinclair, according to the Los Angeles chief of police, “more dangerous
than 4,000 I. W. W.” The complaint on which he was illegally arrested
charged him with “discussing, arguing, orating and debating certain
thoughts and theories, which thoughts and theories ... were detrimental
and in opposition to the orderly conduct of affairs of business,
affecting the rights of private property....” He was accordingly
thrown into jail and held “incommunicado”. While in jail he learned
of an incident which had happened there the day before--fifty men
crowded into a small prison hole without air for singing their I. W. W.
songs--the origin of his play, _Singing Jailbirds_. “I am not”, he
wrote to the chief of police after his release on bail had been at last
effected, “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 policemen with drawn revolvers
flung across a street to keep anyone from coming on to private property
to hear my feeble voice, I am somewhat disturbed in my nerves. 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.”
III.
For a number of years Upton Sinclair has occupied a peculiar situation,
as the publisher of his own books. This, as may be remembered, began
with his first novel, which could at first find no publisher. _The
Jungle_, also, when it had been rejected by five publishers, he decided
to publish himself, and had made the plates when a publisher summoned
up the courage to take it over--and made a fortune on it. Ten years
afterward, _The Profits of Religion_ could find no publisher, and he
published it himself; he has sold some sixty thousand copies, and still
sells two thousand copies every year without advertising. He was told
that there were fifty criminal libel suits and one or two thousand
civil suits in _The Brass Check_, so he published that himself. He
printed twenty-three thousand copies, and they were sold in two or
three weeks; orders came in for forty thousand more, but this was at
a time of paper shortage, and he found it hard to get paper--doubly
hard, because in several instances when it was discovered what the
paper was to be used for the orders were canceled; a hundred and
thirty-five thousand copies were sold altogether, in spite of these
difficulties. “Also”, the author remarks, “I have managed to give
away seven or eight thousand copies of _Singing Jailbirds_.” _Jimmie
Higgins_, _100%_, _The Goose-Step_, _The Goslings_, and _Mammonart_
were similarly published; and the business flourished sufficiently
to enable him to buy the plates and copyrights of books originally
published by other publishers, so that he now owns twenty-six of them,
and has all but three or four in print. He does not, however, recommend
the method to other authors, and tells the story of a man who was in
the business of manufacturing brushes, and whose wife, when he found at
the end of the year that he had been selling the brushes below cost,
said enthusiastically: “But think what an enormous business you do!”
The story sums up, he admits, his own experiences as a publisher. The
method, however, keeps him in touch with his readers. “Never a mail
comes that there is not a letter from some workingman or workingwoman,
some poor student, or teacher, or political prisoner, who has been able
to get my books for one reason and one only--that they are available
at low prices. It is not an unusual thing for me to hear of a single
volume that has been read by scores of people, prisoners in jail, of
workingmen in mines and lumber camps, or teachers in a school, or
professors in a college. I get letters from South Africa and South
America, from Alaska and New Zealand, from India and Russia.” Many of
his books, scarcely heard of in America, are best sellers in Great
Britain and its colonies, in Germany, Italy, Holland, Denmark, the
Scandinavian countries, and the states from Finland down to Serbia,
while hundreds of editions were published in the Union of Socialist
Soviet Republics, where the printing of his books has recently been
made a state monopoly.
IV.
At the age of twenty-three it had been Upton Sinclair’s ambition, as
expressed in the preface to his first novel, to publish a library of
helpful books for “the humble people of our land.” This dream of a
workingmen’s library has recently come true in an indirect way, as one
of the enterprises conducted at his instigation by the “Garland Fund.”
The manner in which the fortune which had been repudiated by a strange
young millionaire named Charles Garland came to be used for this and
other liberal and radical purposes is thus described by Sinclair in
_What’s the Use of Books?_--a pamphlet published by the Vanguard
Press:
“I am going to tell you a story. It is as strange as any fairy story
you ever read, and with this one difference--it happened exactly as I
tell it, and only three or four years ago.
“Once upon a time there was a young man who had been born into a home
of luxury. He had everything in life that a young man could desire,
and before he was twenty-one a relative died and left him a million
dollars. Ask most Americans what they would like to have happen to
them, and they will say that to have a relative die and leave them a
million dollars would suit them fine. But for some strange reason it
didn’t suit this rich young man. He was troubled with an uncomfortable
thing called a conscience; he had the crazy notion that before a man
spends money he ought to earn it. He said that he hadn’t earned that
million dollars, and so he wasn’t going to take it.
“It was none of my business, but I was worried, thinking about that
million dollars, and all the things that could be done with it. Lying
there in a Wall Street bank, piling itself up--according to present-day
customs being loaned out to speculators and big business men, and thus
being used directly contrary to the ideas of the young man! I sat down
and wrote him a letter, pointing this out and begging him to take the
money and use it for spreading his ideas of social justice--or, if
he hadn’t faith enough in his own ideas, then to entrust the money
to a group of the best friends of social justice he could find. Many
others wrote the young man to the same effect, and the upshot was that
he changed his mind, and took the million dollars and established an
endowment called ‘The American Fund for Public Service.’
“So there was a group of men and women having this responsibility; and
right away they began getting letters from me. I wanted them to spend
the money for one thing--cheap books for the workers. Books differ
from most other things in that their inner spirit is not dependent on
their outer form. The most important ideas in the world can be printed
and sold for a few cents, and if you get the ideas they are exactly as
useful to you as if they had come out of a costly volume printed on
vellum and bound in silk. Therefore, I argued, _books should come
first_.
“Others agreed with me, and so there came into being an institution
called the Vanguard Press, having magically in its possession one
hundred thousand dollars of that Wall Street money, and pledged through
its trustees to spend the money in selecting the books most needed by
the every-day people of this country, having them edited and printed,
and offered to the people at the lowest possible prices.”
V.
Throughout his career, with the exception of the brief period during
the war referred to in an earlier chapter, he has been actively
identified with the Socialist Party; he was a Socialist candidate for
Congress in 1906 and 1920, for the Senate in 1922, for governor of
California in 1926. In the present state of the Socialist movement
in America, split as it is between the Socialist and the Workers
(Communist) Party, and with these groups more or less hostile to one
another, he is the one figure, since the death of Debs, who commands
the respect of all branches of the revolutionary movement.
VI.
Most of Upton Sinclair’s personality is expressed in his
social-revolutionary interests and activities. Upton Sinclair,
“the person,” aside from these activities, is a slight, wiry,
graying figure, an early riser and hard worker, keeping one or two
stenographers busy all day; an excellent tennis player, an eager
talker; self-described as “easily bored, naïve and impersonal”; dealing
with “griefs, troubles and failures” by putting his emotions into the
book he is writing; somewhat skeptically interested in spiritistic
phenomena, very hopefully interested in new devices, regarded as
absurd by the medical profession, for curing disease; an occasional
lecturer to women’s clubs, able to mitigate the shock of his opinions
to precisely the amount that such organizations can stand; wearing
the cast-off clothes of a rich young friend, precisely as when he was
seventeen and living on $4.50 a week; always in debt, never hesitating
to borrow money for some project which he regards as for the benefit of
humanity; always hopeful of enormous success in each new project, each
new book; very boyish, impulsive, trustful, stubborn; fondly regarded
as impractical by those who love him ... including a wife who backs
him loyally, and who appears in his writings as “M. C. S.”, and in
_Mammonart_ as “Mrs. Ogi”.
VII.
Upton Sinclair is at this point in his career forty-eight years old;
he intends to live to be as old as Bernard Shaw, and he probably will.
His future literary career may bring surprises; the poet in him may yet
overwhelm the propagandist. It is sufficient, however, to have seen
the development of a raw cub of genius, an ethereal poet, afraid of
real life, into the fearless and robust transcriber of the tragi-comic
welter which is contemporary America. And we may conclude with the
reminder that it is as one of the leaders of a significant American
literary movement that he has here been studied--a movement which will
seem of larger and larger importance to us as we learn and cherish our
own literary history--a movement which was killed twenty years ago
because there was too much troublesome truth in it, and which is only
in these last few years being painfully born again: he is one of the
great pioneers in the fictional discovery and exploitation of modern
America.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
[Books entirely out of print are so marked; editions in print are
marked with a *.]
Springtime and Harvest. A Romance. [With an introduction by the
author, and photograph of the shack in the woods where the book
was written.] Sinclair Press, 1901. [Out of print.]
King Midas. A Romance. [A reissue of Springtime and Harvest with a
new title.] Funk & Wagnalls, 1901. [Out of print.]
The Journal of Arthur Stirling. “The Valley of the Shadow.”
Appleton [anonymous edition], 1903; [with the author’s name,
and an explanatory preface], 1906. Sinclair [with explanatory
postscripts], 1923.*
Prince Hagen. A Phantasy. L. C. Page, 1903. Kerr, 1910. [Out of
print.]
Manassas. A Novel of the War. Macmillan, 1904. Sinclair, 1923.*
A Captain of Industry. [A Tale.] Appeal to Reason, 1906.
Haldeman-Julius [pamphlet], 1924.*
The Jungle. [A Novel.] Doubleday, 1907. Sinclair, 1920.* Vanguard
Press, 1926.*
The Industrial Republic. A Study of the America of Ten Years Hence.
Illustrated. Doubleday, 1907. [Out of print.]
The Overman. [A Tale.] Doubleday, 1907. Haldeman-Julius [pamphlet],
1924.*
The Metropolis. [A Novel.] Moffat Yard, 1908. Sinclair, 1923.*
The Moneychangers. [A Novel.] Dodge, 1910. Sinclair [revised
edition], 1923.*
Good Health and How We Won It. By Upton Sinclair and Michael
Williams. Stokes, 1909. [Out of print.]
Samuel the Seeker. [A Novel.] Dodge, 1910. Sinclair, 1923.*
Plays of Protest. The Naturewoman. The Machine. The Second-Story
Man. Prince Hagen. Kennerley, 1911. Haldeman-Julius [separate
pamphlets], 1924.*
The Fasting Cure. Kennerley, 1911. Sinclair, 1923.*
Love’s Pilgrimage. [A Novel.] Kennerley, 1911. Sinclair, 1926.*
Damaged Goods. [Novelized from Brieux’s play.] Winston, 1913.*
Sylvia. A Novel. Winston, 1913. Sinclair, 1913.*
Sylvia’s Marriage. A Novel. Winston, 1914. Sinclair, 1927.*
The Cry for Justice. An Anthology of the Literature of Social
Protest. With an Introduction by Jack London. Illustrated.
Winston, 1915. Sinclair, 1920.*
King Coal. A Novel. With an Introduction by Dr. Georg Brandes.
Macmillan, 1917. Sinclair, 1917.*
The Profits of Religion. An Essay in Economic Interpretation.
Sinclair, 1918.* Vanguard Press, 1927.*
The Brass Check. A Study of American Journalism. Sinclair, 1919.*
The Crimes of the “Times”. [Pamphlet.] Sinclair, 1919.*
100%. The Story of a Patriot. Sinclair, 1920.*
The Bock of Life. Macmillan, 1921-22. Sinclair, 1921-22.*
They Call Me Carpenter. A Tale of the Second Coming. Boni &
Liveright, 1922. Sinclair, 1922.*
Hell. A Verse Drama and Photo-Play. [Pamphlet.] Sinclair, 1923.*
The Goose-Step. A Study of American Education. Sinclair, 1923.*
The Goslings. A Study of American Schools. Sinclair, 1924.*
Singing Jailbirds. A Drama in Four Acts. Sinclair, 1924.*
The Millennium. A Comedy of the Year 2000. [A tale based on a
play written in 1907 and subsequently lost.] Haldeman-Julius
[pamphlets], 1924.*
The Pot-Boiler. A Comedy in Four Acts. [Written in 1912.]
Haldeman-Julius [pamphlet], 1924.*
Mammonart. An Essay in Economic Interpretation. Sinclair, 1925.*
Bill Porter. A Drama of O. Henry in Prison. Sinclair, 1925.*
Letters to Judd, An American Workingman. Sinclair, 1926.*
The Spokesman’s Secretary, Being the Letters of Mame to Mom.
Sinclair, 1926.*
Oil! A Novel. A. & C. Boni, 1927.* Sinclair. 1927.*
INDEX
Alcohol, 21, 29 note.
Annapolis, 22, 47
Appeal to Reason, 104, 146
Arden, Del., 125 _et seq._
_Argosy, The_, 44, 46
Asceticism, 29 _et seq._, 60 _et seq._
Associated Press, 138, 139, 165, 166
Baltimore, Md., 16, 19
Bloor, Ella Reeve, 107
_Book of Life, The_, 151
Boys’ stories, 46, 47
Brandes, Georg, 113, 141
_Brass Check, The_, 165, quoted _passim_
Brieux, 133
Broadway demonstration, 137
Budget, 41
Carlyle, 36
“Chappie”, 32
Chicago, 16, 17 note, 103, 104, 107
Church, 38, 39, 162
Clothes, 41 note, 186
Coal Strike, 137
College, 34, 49, 52, 53
Colorado, 137
Constitution, U. S., 180
“Corydon”, 65
_Country House Built for Only $156, A_, 79
_Cry for Justice, The_, 140
_Damaged Goods_, 133
Dead Hand, The, 164
Divorce, 130
Eden Musée, 17 note
Emerson, 36
Farragut, David, 17, 18
_Fasting Cure, The_, 128
Free-Speech fight at Los Angeles, 180
Galahad, 61
Garland, Charles, 183
Genius and its claims, 50, 86
Genteel tradition in American Literature, 110
German Lessons, 68
Goethe’s picture, 54
_Goose-Step, The_, 167
Gorky incident, 111
_Goslings, The_, 168
Greenwich Village, 30 note
Hackwork, 41
Hamlet, 33, 39
Helicon Hall, 121
Herron, George D., 97, 100
Holland, 131, 132
_In the days of Decatur_, 46
_In the net of the Visconti_, 46
Indigestion, 42, 73, 128
_Industrial Republic, The_, 118
Intercollegiate Socialist Society, 103
Jail, 126, 138, 181
Jesus, 27, 33, 39
_Jimmie Higgins_, 146, 148
Jokes, 44
_Journal of Arthur Stirling, The_, 78, 86
_Jungle, The_, 84, 104
“Killing Spaniards”, 47
_King Coal_, 140
_King Midas_, 78
Languages, learning of, 53
Lee, Robert E., 20, 37
Lewis, Sinclair, 124
Lincoln, 37
Literary enthusiasms, 27, 36, 37, 39, 43, 52, 53, 54, 58, 61, 63, 93,
94
London, Jack, 102, 106, 114
_Love’s Pilgrimage_, 128, 176 quoted _passim_
_Love’s Progress_, 129 note, 175
Ludlow massacre, 137
_Machine, The_, 116
_Mammonart_, 169
_Manassas_, 101, 115
Marriage, 72; 2d, 136
_Metropolis, The_, 113, 114
Moir, Rev. William W., 39, 61
_Moneychangers, The_, 113, 116
“Mourning pickets”, 137
Moyer and Haywood, 111
“Muck-raking”, 109, 161
Music, 26, 28, 29 note, 65, 73
_My cause_, 94
New York, 31
Nietzsche, 52
Norfolk, 17
Norris, Frank, 104, 114, 160
_Oil!_, 178
_100%: The Story of a Patriot_, 149
Packingtown, 103, 104, 107
Perry, Commodore, 17
Phillips, David Graham, 105, 109
Picketing on Broadway, 137
Play, 29, 186
Plays, 125, 179
Poetic ambitions, 42, 51, 56, 88
_Prince Hagen_, 78, 99
Professors, 35, 52
_Profits of Religion, The_, 162
Publisher of his own books, 181
Puritanism, 13, 155, 175
Realism, defense of, 176
Residence, 16, 31, 55, 72, 79, 84 note, 87, 103, 121, 125, 131, 132,
136, 137, 139, 140, 143[16]
Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 137, 139, 140
Roosevelt, Theodore, 107, 108
Ruskin, 37
Russia, 148, 158
Sabbath-breaking, see Arden
_Samuel the Seeker_, 128
San Pedro arrest, 180
Scott, Sir Walter, 49
Shelley, 39, 53, 94, 160
_Singing Jailbirds_, 181
Single-tax colony, see Arden
Socialism, 97, 119, 158, 185
Socialists and the war, 143
_Springtime and Harvest_, 55, 74, 78
_Spy, The_, 149
Stockyards, 103, 104, 107
Street & Smith, 46
_Sylvia_, 132
_Sylvia’s Marriage_, 133
Tarrytown, 139
Tennis, 29 note, 186
Thackeray, 27
“Thyrsis”, 69 _et passim_
Tolstoyan-Tennysonian idealism, 70
Toys, 28
_Upton Sinclair’s_, 146
van Eeden, Frederik, 128, 131
Wells, H. G., 118, 151
_What’s the Use of Books?_, 183
Wilson, Woodrow, 146, 148, 150 note
Zola, 160
FOOTNOTES
[1] He did, however, hear about the Haymarket riot later, when
the family moved to New York. “I remember seeing wax-works of the
anarchists making their bombs, in the Eden Musée, and I believed every
word of it--or shall I say, every wax-work of it. I well remember
the name of Altgeld [the governor of Illinois who later pardoned
the surviving Haymarket anarchists from prison] as a kind of super
bomb-thrower! I swallowed all its ideas complete.”
[2] “Sinclair, Arthur. Lieutenant, 10 June, 1807. Commander, 2 July,
1812. Captain, 24 July, 1813. Died 7 February, 1837.”--_U. S. Army
and Navy Register._
[3] “Sinclair, Arthur. Midshipman, 4 March, 1823. Passed midshipman, 4
June, 1831. Lieutenant, 3 March, 1835. Commander, 14 September, 1855.
Dismissed 18 April, 1861.”--_U. S. Army and Navy Register._
[4] However, Sinclair writes in a private letter: “I am not opposed to
the play aspects of life. The facts are these: As a boy, I did every
kind of playing that boys can do. I played tennis in Central Park,
football and baseball in vacant lots, and was nabbed by the police in
the usual style, built bonfires and roasted stolen potatoes, skated
on ice in winter and played shinny on roller skates the rest of the
year, climbed on the roofs and threw clothes-pins at the people on the
street. I was in every kind of danger. I used to say, playfully, that
fate must be keeping me alive for some purpose, because I had escaped
death by a hair’s breadth a dozen times before I was fourteen. I could
outrun any boys I knew for long distances. I have run all the way
around Central Park, and I have ridden a bicycle from up town in New
York over Brooklyn bridge to Coney Island, gone in swimming in March
with snow on the ground, and then ridden home again; this at the age of
seventeen. At about that age I set out with desperate determination to
learn to play the violin, practicing eight hours a day. It was work,
but done in order that I might be able to play. At the present time,
when my wife is ill and I have to stay at home nearly all the time, I
play an hour or two every day--always sight reading, and I get as much
excitement out of struggling through a Mozart sonata as some people
get out of a horse-race. I get as much fun out of a tennis tournament
as any of the young fellows. I have also been devoted to the theatre,
having never missed seeing a good play except because of poverty.
“From the age of twenty to twenty-eight or twenty-nine I did no
playing, but this was because I was in a desperate struggle to survive
as a writer; but that was not a matter of philosophy but of practical
necessity. You wouldn’t say that a man was opposed to play because he
didn’t play while he was in a battle.
“Theoretically I am opposed to play under the following circumstances;
first, when it is cruel and involves wanton suffering to either human
beings or animals. I have always enjoyed hunting and fishing, but the
game or fish were always eaten. Second, when the play is destructive
to health; and that is the basis of my objections to the kind of play
which involves alcohol. I know so many ways to have a good time which
do not involve a headache next morning. Naturally, the condition of my
father’s liver when he died has a good deal to do with this attitude.
Third, play which is not a recreation after work, but a substitute for
work. I saw in Greenwich Village a great many young idlers calling
themselves radicals and doing nothing for the movement, and that made
me tired....
“I think you mistake my attitude toward dancing. As a boy at various
‘springs’ in Virginia, I danced a lot and was duly dressed up for fancy
balls. I remember very well being a ‘baker’. I don’t think I was more
than six years old, and I was expected to carry a tray with rolls on
it, but I very soon shed that encumbrance. Later on I never danced,
simply because the dancing I saw was done by the idlers of ‘society’,
wasting time, and it was a matter of expensive clothes, and all that
sort of social frummery: either that, or you had to patronize the
underworld. My objection to modern jazz dancing is that it represents
the taking possession of America by that underworld. I think that jazz
dances are awkward and ugly, being imitations of savage sex dances. Of
course, as time goes on, if they survive, they will be idealized....