Gaylord Wilshire had made a fortune in billboard advertising in Los
Angeles (Wilshire Boulevard is named after him). Then out of a clear sky
he announced his conversion to socialism, made a speech in one of the
city parks, and was sent to jail for it. He started a weekly; he then
brought it to New York and turned it into a monthly. He was spending his
money fast, offering prizes such as grand pianos and trips around the
world for the greatest number of new subscribers. He had a standing
offer of ten thousand dollars to William Jennings Bryan to debate
socialism with him, but the canny “boy orator” never took that easy
money; he knew nothing about socialism, and the quick-witted editor
would have made a monkey of him.
Wilshire always insisted that his conversion was purely a matter of
intellect; he had become convinced that capitalism was self-eliminating,
and that its breakdown was near. But as a matter of fact, a sense of
justice and a kind heart had much to do with his crusade. To hear him
talk, you would think him a cynical man of the world, a veritable
Mephisto; but his greatest faults were generosity, which made it
impossible for him to keep money, and a sort of “Colonel Sellers”
optimism, which made him sure he was going to get a lot more at once.
The advertising men in New York had assured him that the problem of a
monthly magazine was solved when it got four hundred thousand
subscribers, because at that mark the advertising made any magazine
self-sustaining. Hence the prizes; but alas, when the four hundred
thousand mark was reached, it was discovered that the big national
advertisers would not patronize a magazine that in its reading columns
threatened their privileges. So Wilshire was “stuck,” and went into the
business of mining gold in order to keep his magazine going in spite of
the advertisers. That is a tale I shall tell later.
The editor took me uptown and introduced me to two sisters, of whom the
older soon became his wife. The couple came to Princeton on their
honeymoon and became our intimate friends. Mary Wilshire was a sort of
older sister to me--though as a matter of fact I believe she was
younger. “Gay” printed my picture in his magazine, and introduced me to
the socialist movement as a coming novelist. I wrote for his columns--I
remember “The Toy and the Man,” wherein I poked fun at the desire of
grown-up Americans to accumulate quantities of unnecessary material
things. If you look about you at the America of sixty years later, you
will see that my sermon failed entirely of its effect.
It was either that summer or the next that the Wilshires took us with
them for a two-week trip to Halifax, the editor having got
transportation in exchange for advertising. We drove about and saw the
Nova Scotia country, at its loveliest in early summer, and went swimming
by moonlight in an inland lake. Incidentally, I discovered some
cousins--it seems that a branch of the Sinclairs had left Virginia after
the Civil War; so here was a surgeon at this British Army station.
Somehow I got the impression that he was not entirely proud of his young
genius relative, with an unmodish wife who took care of her own baby. He
did not invite us to meet the wealth and fashion of the British Army,
and we had time to ramble alone on the beach, where the baby filled his
chubby fists with masses of squashy starfish.
IV
_Manassas_ was completed in the spring of 1904 and published in August.
Meanwhile I was reading the socialist weekly, _Appeal to Reason_, which
was published in Girard, Kansas; it then had a circulation of half a
million, and doubled it in the next few years. At that time two Western
Miners’ officials, Moyer and Haywood, were being tried for a murder that
they probably did not commit. The _Appeal_ was sure of their innocence.
I was too, and in general I was becoming a red-hot “radical.” When the
twenty thousand workers in the Chicago stockyards had their strike
smashed in a most shocking way, I wrote a manifesto addressed to them:
“You have lost the strike, and now what are you going to do about it?”
This was just the sort of thing the _Appeal_ wanted, and they made it
into a shouting first-page broadside and distributed hundreds of
thousands of copies. I wrote a second broadside, “Farmers of America,
Unite!” The _Appeal_ paid me for this by sending me twenty or thirty
thousand copies, which was like a present of a herd of white elephants!
I had to hire a boy and a horse and buggy for a couple of weeks to
distribute them over the countryside around Princeton. Two years later I
ran for Congress on the socialist ticket in that district, and maybe my
propaganda got me half a dozen extra votes.
I learned something about the American small farming community during my
three and a half years near Princeton. What their fathers had done, they
did; as their fathers had voted, so voted they, and thought it was for
Lincoln, or perhaps Tilden. They lived in pitiful ignorance and under
the shadow of degeneracy. I often thought of writing a book about
them--but you would not have believed me, because the facts fitted so
perfectly into my socialist thesis that you would have been sure I was
making them to order.
In a neighborhood two miles square, which I knew by personal contact and
the gossip of neighbors, the only decent families were half a dozen that
lived on farms of a hundred acres or more. The families that lived on
ten or twenty-acre farms contained drunkards, degenerates, mental or
physical defectives, semi-idiots, victims of tuberculosis or of venereal
disease, and now and then a petty criminal. You could descend in the
scale, according to the size of the farm, until you came to the Jukes--I
don’t recall their real name, but students of eugenics will accept that
substitute. The Jukes had no farm at all, but squatted in an old barn,
and had six half-naked brats, and got drunk on vinegar, and beat each
other, and howled and screamed and rioted, and stole poultry and apples
from the neighbors.
These small farmers of New Jersey and other eastern states represented
what had been left behind from wave after wave of migration--either to
the West or to the cities. The capable and active ones escaped, while
the weak ones stayed behind and constituted our “farm problem.”
Prohibition did not touch them because they made their own “applejack,”
with sixty per cent alcohol. Politics touched them only once a year,
when they were paid from two to five dollars for each vote the family
could produce. They worked their children sixteen hours a day and sent
them to school three or four months in winter, where they learned enough
to figure a list of groceries, and to read a local weekly containing
reports of church “sociables” and a few canned items supplied by the
power trust; also a Methodist or Baptist paper, with praises of the
“blood of the Lamb” and of patent medicines containing opium and
coal-tar poisons. Such was agricultural New Jersey almost sixty years
ago. The farms still go on voting for Lincoln and McKinley, and hating
the labor unions that force up the prices of the things farmers have to
buy.
V
A play called _Candida_ by a new British dramatist had been produced in
New York. I had no money to see plays, but I borrowed the book, and it
was like meeting Shelley face to face, a rapturous experience. Then came
_Man and Superman_--I remember reading it in the summertime, lying in a
hammock by my woodland cabin and kicking my heels in the air with
delight over the picture of the British aristocracy in heaven--not
understanding the music, and being bored to death, but staying because
they considered that their social position required it.
I was supporting my wife now, after a fashion, and so was in better
standing with my father-in-law. He had a six-week vacation in the latter
half of the summer, and invited me to accompany him on a canoe trip in
northern Ontario. My father-in-law was a city-bred man with a passion
for the primitive; he wanted to get to some place where no man had ever
been before, and then he would explode with delight and exclaim, “Wild
as hell!” We went up to the head of Lake Temeskaming, made a long
portage, and paddled over a chain of lakes some two or three hundred
miles, coming out by the Sturgeon River to Lake Winnipeg. We took two
canoes, and lugged them heroically on our shoulders, and learned to use
a “tumpline,” and ran dangerous rapids with many thrills, and killed a
dozen great pike in a day, and paddled up to a dozen moose so close that
we could have touched them with our paddles. This country, which is full
of cobalt and copper, is now a great mining region, but at that time
there were not even trails, and the only white man we saw in several
weeks was the keeper of a Hudson’s Bay Company post.
Here were Indians living in their primitive condition, and this
interested me greatly. I asked many questions, and the trader at the
post told me how in wintertime these Indians would kill a moose, and
then move to the moose, and camp there until they had picked the bones.
When I was writing _Oil!_ I remembered this; I told about “Dad,” my
oilman, who would drill a well, and move his family to the well; I
compared him to the Indians who moved their families to a moose. Later
in the book I remarked, “Dad had moved to another moose”; and this got
me into trouble with printers and proofreaders, who would insist upon
making “moose” into “house.” I changed it back two or three times--until
finally I received a letter from one of the executives of the firm,
calling my attention to the difficulty; surely I could not be meaning to
say that Dad had moved to a _moose_!
Going back home, I found _Manassas_ about to appear, and this was the
psychological moment to make a killing with the magazines. Gertrude
Atherton had published in the _North American Review_ an article
speculating as to why American literature, with so many opportunities to
be robust, should be so bourgeois. I wrote a reply, interpreting
American literature in terms of economics; but the _Review_ turned me
down. I took the article to _Colliers_, then edited by Norman Hapgood,
and he published it. The article was one of the strongest I have ever
written, but there was not a line about it in the capitalist newspapers.
I could not comprehend this; but now, after it has happened to me so
many times, I know what to think.
_Collier’s_ published another article of mine, telling the American
people what socialists believed and aimed at. But that was the last. The
editors accepted an open letter to Lincoln Steffens about his series of
articles on “The Shame of the Cities,” which was appearing in
_McClure’s_. I had written a criticism of his articles, pointing out
that the corruption he reported came about because big business bought
the politicians or elected them; and that there could never be an end to
it until the government owned businesses, especially the public
utilities. I sent the article to Steffens. He wrote me that it was the
best criticism of his work that he had seen; he wanted _McClure’s_ to
publish it, but they didn’t dare to. So I turned it into an open letter
and sent it to _Collier’s_. I have told in _The Brass Check_ how I was
invited to Robbie Collier’s for dinner, and how old Peter Collier,
ex-packpeddler, announced to me that he would not permit my articles to
appear in his paper and “scare away” his half-million subscribers. The
greater part of the letter to Steffens was published in my book, _The
Industrial Republic_, long since out of print. It contained a remarkable
prophecy of our successive world crises.
Steffens and I became friends at that time. He remained always one of my
closest and dearest friends, and we met whenever we were in the same
neighborhood. In 1914, I remember, he came out to Croton, near New York,
where we had rented a little house, and spent several weekends with us.
Once I took him for a tramp in the snow before he had had his coffee. He
appealed to my wife never to let that happen again, and she promised.
VI
_Manassas_ appeared, and won critical praise, but sold less than two
thousand copies. The “men of this land” did not care about the heritage
that was come down to them; or, at any rate, they did not care to hear
about it from me. The five-hundred-dollar advance on this book was about
all I got for my labors. I had written in the course of four and one
half years a total of six novels or novelettes, published four of them,
and the sum of my receipts therefrom was less than one thousand dollars.
Nevertheless, _Manassas_ was the means of leading me out of the woods.
The editor of the _Appeal to Reason_ read it and wrote me with
enthusiasm; I had portrayed the struggle over chattel slavery in
America, and now, why not do the same thing for wage slavery? I answered
that I would do it, provided he would stake me. The editor, Fred D.
Warren, agreed to advance five hundred dollars for the serial rights of
the novel, and I selected the Chicago stockyards as its scene. The
recent strike had brought the subject to my thoughts; and my manifesto,
“You have lost the strike,” had put me in touch with socialists among
the stockyard workers.
So, in October 1904 I set out for Chicago, and for seven weeks lived
among the wage slaves of the Beef Trust, as we called it in those days.
People used to ask me afterward if I had not spent my life in Chicago,
and I answered that if I had done so, I could never have written _The
Jungle_; I would have taken for granted things that now hit me a sudden
violent blow. I went about, white-faced and thin, partly from
undernourishment, partly from horror. It seemed to me I was confronting
a veritable fortress of oppression. How to breach those walls, or to
scale them, was a military problem.
I sat at night in the homes of the workers, foreign-born and native, and
they told me their stories, one after one, and I made notes of
everything. In the daytime I would wander about the yards, and my
friends would risk their jobs to show me what I wanted to see. I was not
much better dressed than the workers, and found that by the simple
device of carrying a dinner pail I could go anywhere. So long as I kept
moving, no one would heed me. When I wanted to make careful
observations, I would pass again and again through the same room.
I went about the district, talking with lawyers, doctors, dentists,
nurses, policemen, politicians, real-estate agents--every sort of
person. I got my meals at the University Settlement, where I could check
my data with the men and women who were giving their lives to this
neighborhood. When the book appeared, they were a little shocked to find
how bad it seemed to the outside world; but Mary MacDowell and her group
stood by me pretty bravely--considering that the packers had given them
the cots on which the strike breakers had slept during their sojourn
inside the packing plants in violation of city laws!
I remember being invited to Hull House to dinner and sitting next to the
saintly Jane Addams. I got into an argument with her consecrated band,
and upheld my contention that the one useful purpose of settlements was
the making of settlement workers into socialists. Afterward Jane Addams
remarked to a friend that I was a young man who had a great deal to
learn. Both she and I went on diligently learning, so that when we met
again, we did not have so much to argue over.
One stroke of good fortune for me was the presence in Chicago of Adolphe
Smith, correspondent of the _Lancet_, the leading medical paper of Great
Britain. Smith was one of the founders of the Social-Democratic
Federation in England, and at the same time an authority on abattoirs,
having studied the packing plants of the world for the _Lancet_.
Whenever I was in doubt about the significance of my facts--when I
wondered if possibly my horror might be the oversensitiveness of a young
idealist--I would fortify myself by Smith’s expert, professional horror.
“These are not packing plants at all,” he declared; “these are packing
boxes crammed with wage slaves.”
At the end of a month or more, I had my data and knew the story I meant
to tell, but I had no characters. Wandering about “back of the yards”
one Sunday afternoon I saw a wedding party going into the rear room of a
saloon. There were several carriages full of people. I stopped to watch,
and as they seemed hospitable, I slipped into the room and stood against
the wall. There the opening chapter of _The Jungle_ began to take form.
There were my characters--the bride, the groom, the old mother and
father, the boisterous cousin, the children, the three musicians,
everybody. I watched them one after another, fitted them into my story,
and began to write the scene in my mind, going over it and over, as was
my custom, fixing it fast. I went away to supper, and came back again,
and stayed until late at night, sitting in a chair against the wall, not
talking to anyone, just watching, imagining, and engraving the details
on my mind. It was two months before I got settled at home and first put
pen to paper; but the story stayed, and I wrote down whole paragraphs,
whole pages, exactly as I had memorized them.
VII
Our life in the little sixteen-by-eighteen cabin had been wretched, and
we had set our hearts upon getting a regular farmhouse. We had gone
riding about the neighborhood, imagining ourselves in this house and
that--I looking for economy, and Corydon looking for beauty, and both of
us having the “blues” because the two never came together. Finally
Corydon had her way--in imagination at any rate; we chose a farm with a
good eight-room house that could be bought for $2,600, one thousand cash
and the rest on mortgage. There were sixty acres to the place, with good
barns, a wood lot, and three orchards; we imagined a cow, some chickens,
a horse and buggy--and persuaded ourselves that all this would pay for
itself.
Now, before starting on _The Jungle_, I went to call upon Dr. Savage,
who had married us; I poured out my woes upon his devoted head. I told
him how Corydon had come close to suicide the previous winter and how I
dreaded another siege in our crowded quarters. I so worked upon his
feelings that he agreed to lend me a thousand dollars, and take another
mortgage on the farm as security. Poor, kind soul, he must have listened
to many a painful story in that big church study of his! He assured me
he was not a rich man, and I was glad when I was able to repay the money
at the end of a year.
We moved into the new, palatial quarters, elegantly furnished with odds
and ends picked up at the “vendues” that were held here and there over
the countryside whenever some one died or moved away. You stood around
in the snow and stamped your feet, and waited for a chance to bid on a
lot of three kitchen chairs, with one seat and two rungs missing, or a
dozen dishes piled in a cracked washbasin. You paid cash and had
twenty-four hours in which to fetch your goods. I purchased a cow at
such a sale, also a horse and buggy.
For my previous winters writing I had built with my own hands a little
cabin, eight feet wide and ten feet long, roofed with tar paper, and
supplied with one door and one window. In it stood a table, a chair, a
homemade shelf for books, and a little round potbellied stove that
burned coal--since the urgencies of inspiration were incompatible with
keeping up a wood fire. This little cabin was now loaded onto a farmer’s
wagon and transported to the new place, and set up on an exposed ridge;
in those days I valued view more than shelter, but nowadays I am less
romantic, and keep out of the wind. To this retreat I repaired on
Christmas Day, and started the first chapter of _The Jungle_.
For three months I worked incessantly. I wrote with tears and anguish,
pouring into the pages all the pain that 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 wintertime in Chicago? I had only to recall the
previous winter in the cabin, when we had had only cotton blankets, and
had put rugs on top of us, and cowered shivering in our separate beds.
It was the same with hunger, with illness, with fear. Ona was Corydon,
speaking Lithuanian but otherwise unchanged. Our little boy was down
with pneumonia that winter, and nearly died, and the grief of that went
into the book.
VIII
Three months of incessant work and little exercise put my stomach nearly
out of commission. A relative offered me some kind of pass on a steamer
to Savannah, and I took this trip, and went on to Florida, and spent a
couple of weeks roaming the beaches and fishing in the surf; I came back
refreshed, and put in the spring and summer on my task. The story had
begun in the _Appeal to Reason_--circulation half a million--and I was
getting letters from readers; I realized that this time I had something
that would be read. “I am afraid to trust myself to tell you how it
affects me,” wrote David Graham Phillips.
Of course I had some human life during that year. There were times when
the country was beautiful; when the first snow fell, and again when the
peach orchard turned pink, the pear orchard white, and the apple orchard
pink and white. We had a vegetable garden, and had not yet discovered
that it cost us more than buying the vegetables. We bought some goose
eggs, hatched a flock of eight or ten, and chased them all over the
countryside until one day they disappeared into the stomachs of the
foxes or the Jukeses. I worked on the place all my spare time in summer
and became a jack-of-all-trades. I drove a hayrake, which was
picturesque and romantic--except that the clouds of pollen dust set me
to sneezing my head off. I was continually catching cold in those days,
and was still at the stage where I went to doctors, and let them give
me pills and powders, and pump my nose full of red and blue and green
and yellow-colored liquids, which never had the slightest effect that I
could discover.
Shortly before the completion of the book, I set to work at the
launching of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. I had reflected much
upon my education in college and university, and made sure that my
ignorance of the modern revolutionary movement had not been an accident.
Since the professors refused to teach the students about modern life, it
was up to the students to teach themselves; so I sent a circular letter
to all the college socialists I knew of and invited them to organize. On
September 12, 1905, we had a dinner at Peck’s Restaurant on Fulton
Street in New York, and chose Jack London as our president. The
newspapers gave three or four inches to the doings of this peculiar set
of cranks. I remember calling up the secretary of some university club
to ask for the membership list, and I could not make him understand the
strange name of our organization. “Intercollegiate _Socialist_ Society,
you say?” The Catholic Anarchist League, the Royal Communist Club, the
Association of Baptist Bolsheviks!
We had no income, of course, and everything was done by volunteer labor.
Many times I sat up until two or three in the morning, wrapping packages
of literature to be mailed to persons who did not always want them and
sometimes wrote to say so. One who attended our first meeting was a
young student at Wesleyan by the name of Harry Laidler, and for several
years it was my dream that some day we might have an income of eighteen
dollars per week so that Harry could be our full-time secretary. The
organization, now known as the League for Industrial Democracy, has not
merely Harry W. Laidler but Norman Thomas also, and has raised about
fifty thousand dollars a year. Not so much, compared with the resources
of the power trust, but we have interested and trained two generations
of socialists, progressives, and liberals. The league has been at the
same address, 112 East 19th Street, New York, for some fifty-five
years--in itself an achievement; if you want to know about it, send a
postcard.