which the principal speaker was to be Jack London. I had corresponded
with him from the time of his first novel. At this time he had had his
great success with _The Sea Wolf_. He was on the crest of the wave of
glory and a hero in the movement of social protest. He was traveling
from California to Florida by sea, then by train to New York, and he was
due to arrive on the very evening of the meeting. His train was late,
and I had been asked to keep the crowd entertained until he arrived. The
hall was packed. I was in something of a panic because I didn’t think
that I was equal to the assignment. But just as I started for the
platform, a roar of cheers broke out--our hero and his wife were walking
down the aisle.
Jack was not much taller than I, but he was broadly built--the picture
of an athlete. That night he gave us the substance of his famous
discourse, “Revolution,” later published in a little red paper pamphlet.
The crowd that listened so raptly was not, I must admit, very
collegiate. A few students came, but most of the audience was from the
Lower East Side; the ushers were Jewish boys and girls wearing red
badges. The socialist fervor of that evening now seems like even more
ancient history than it is. A good part of it went into the communist
movement, of course, and my friend Scott Nearing used to ask me how I
could continue to belong to the Socialist Party, made up of lawyers and
retired real-estate speculators!
IX
The first chapters of _The Jungle_ had been read by George P. Brett of
the Macmillan Company, who was impressed by the book, and gave me an
advance of five hundred dollars. The last chapters were not up to
standard, because both my health and my money were gone, and a second
trip to Chicago, which I had hoped to make, was out of the question. I
did the best I could--and those critics who didn’t like the ending ought
to have seen it as it was in manuscript! I ran wild at the end,
attempting to solve all the problems of America; I put in the
Moyer-Haywood case, everything I knew and thought my readers ought to
know. I submitted these chapters to a test and got a cruel verdict; the
editor of the _Appeal_ came to visit me, and sat in my little living
room one evening to hear the story--and fell sound asleep! The polite
author went on reading for an hour or so, hoping that his guest would
wake up and be spared the embarrassment of being “caught!” (I cut the
material out.)
I was called to New York for an interview with Mr. Brett. He wanted me
to cut out some of the “blood and guts” from the book; nothing so
horrible had ever been published in America--at least not by a
respectable concern. Brett had been a discerning but somewhat reserved
critic of my manuscripts so far; if I had taken his advice, I would have
had an easier time in life--but I would have had to be a different
person. Out of his vast publishing experience he now assured me that he
could sell three times as many copies of my book if I would only consent
to remove the objectionable passages; if I were unwilling to do this,
his firm would be compelled to decline the book. I remember taking the
problem to Lincoln Steffens, an older muckraker than I. Said he: “It is
useless to tell things that are incredible, even though they may be
true.” But I could not take his advice; I had to tell the truth, and let
people make of it what they could.
I forget who were the other publishers that turned down _The Jungle_.
There were five in all; and by that time I was raging and determined to
publish it myself. The editor of the _Appeal_ generously consented to
give space to a statement of my troubles. Jack London wrote a rousing
manifesto, calling on the socialist movement to rally to the book, which
he called “the _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ of wage slavery. It is alive and
warm. It is brutal with life. It is written of sweat and blood, and
groans and tears.” I offered a “Sustainer’s Edition,” price $1.20,
postpaid, and in a month or two I took in four thousand dollars--more
money than I had been able to earn in all the past five years. Success
always went to my head, and I became drunk, thinking it was going to be
like that the rest of my life; and so I could found a colony, or start a
magazine, or produce a play, or win a strike--whatever might be
necessary to change the world into what it ought to be.
In this case the first thing I did was to buy a saddle horse for a
hundred and twenty-five dollars. It wasn’t as reckless as it sounds
because the horse could also be driven to the buggy, and I had to have
some form of exercise to help the poor stomach that apparently was not
equal to keeping up with the head. Also I had to have some way to get
into town quickly, because I now had a business on my hands and had to
be sending telegrams and mailing proofs. I had a printing firm in New
York at work putting _The Jungle_ into type. Then, just as the work was
completed, someone suggested that I offer the book to Doubleday, Page
and Company. So I found myself in New York again, for a series of
conferences with Walter H. Page and his young assistants.
This publisher and editor played an important part in American history,
so I will tell what I saw of him. He was extremely kind and extremely
naïve; being good himself, he believed that other people were good; and
just as he was swallowed alive by Balfour and other British Tories
during World War I, so he was very nearly swallowed by the Chicago
packers. Anxious not to do anybody harm in such a good and beautiful
world, he submitted the proofs of _The Jungle_ to James Keeley, managing
editor of the Chicago _Tribune_ and a highly honorable gentleman, who
sent back a thirty-two page report on the book, prepared, so Keeley
avowed, by one of his reporters, a disinterested and competent man. I
sat down to a luncheon with the firm, at which this report was produced,
and I talked for two or three hours, exposing its rascalities. I
persuaded the firm to make an investigation of their own, and so they
sent out a young lawyer, and the first person this lawyer met in the
yards was a publicity agent of the packers. The lawyer mentioned _The
Jungle_, and the agent said, “Oh, yes, I know that book. I read the
proofs of it and prepared a thirty-two page report for James Keeley of
the _Tribune_.”
X
The young lawyer’s report upheld me, so Doubleday, Page agreed to bring
out the book, allowing me to have a simultaneous edition of my own to
supply my “sustainers.” The book was published in February 1906, and the
controversy started at once. The answer of the packers appeared in a
series of articles by J. Ogden Armour in the _Saturday Evening Post_,
whose editor was Armour’s former secretary, George Horace Lorimer. The
great packer did not condescend to name any book, but he referred in
dignified fashion to the unscrupulous attacks upon his great business,
which was noble in all its motives and turned out products free from
every blemish. I remember reading this canned literature in Princeton,
and thinking it over as I rode my new saddle horse back to the farm. I
was boiling, and automatically my material began to sort itself out in
my mind. By the time I got home, I had a reply complete, and sat down
and wrote all through the night; the next morning I had an
eight-thousand-word magazine article, “The Condemned Meat Industry.”
I took the first train for New York, and went to _Everybody’s Magazine_,
which had just electrified the country with Thomas W. Lawson’s exposure
of Wall Street methods. I figured they would be looking for something
new, and I asked to see the publisher of the magazine--realizing that
this was a matter too important to be decided by a mere editor. I saw E.
J. Ridgway and told him what I had, and he called in his staff of
editors. I read them the article straight through and it was accepted on
the spot, price eight hundred dollars. They stopped the presses on which
the May issue of the magazine was being printed, and took out a story to
make room for mine. Two lawyers were summoned, and once more I had to go
over my material line by line, and justify my statements.
It was dynamite, no mistake. Bob Davis, of _Munsey’s Magazine_--how I
blessed him for it!--had introduced me to a wild, one-eyed Irishman who
had been a foreman on Armour’s killing beds and had told under oath the
story of how the condemned carcasses, thrown into the tanks to be
destroyed, were taken out at the bottom of the tanks and sold in the
city for meat. The Armours had come to him, and offered him five
thousand dollars to retract his story; by advice of a lawyer he accepted
the money and put it in the bank for his little daughter, and then made
another affidavit, telling how he had been bribed and why. I had both
these affidavits; also I had the court records of many pleas of guilty
that Mr. Armour and his associates had entered in various states to the
charge of selling adulterated meat products. It made a marvelous
companion piece to Mr. Armour’s canned literature in the _Saturday
Evening Post_.
The article in _Everybody’s_ was expected to blow off the roof. But
alas, it appeared on the newsstands on April 20, and April 19 was the
date selected by the Maker of History for the destruction of San
Francisco by earthquake and fire. So the capitalist news agencies had an
excuse for not sending out any stories about “The Condemned Meat
Industry!” I have met with that sort of misfortune several times in the
course of my efforts to reach the public. In 1927 I traveled all the way
across the continent in order to make war on the city of Boston for the
suppression of my novel, _Oil!_; and just as I set to work, Lindbergh
landed in America after his flight to France! For a couple of weeks
there was nothing in the American newspapers but the “lone eagle” and
the advertisements.
XI
However, _The Jungle_ made the front page a little later, thanks to the
efforts of the greatest publicity man of that time, Theodore Roosevelt.
For the utilizing of Roosevelt in our campaign, credit was claimed by
Isaac F. Marcosson, press agent for Doubleday, Page and Company, in his
book, _Adventures in Interviewing_. If I dispute his exclusive claim, it
is because both of us sent copies of the book to the President, and both
got letters saying that he was investigating the charges. (Roosevelt’s
secretary later told me that he had been getting a hundred letters a day
about _The Jungle_.) The President wrote to me that he was having the
Department of Agriculture investigate the matter, and I replied that
that was like asking a burglar to determine his own guilt. If Roosevelt
really wanted to know anything about conditions in the yards, he would
have to make a secret and confidential investigation.
The result was a request for me to come to Washington. I was invited to
luncheon at the White House, where I met James R. Garfield, Francis E.
Leupp, and one or two other members of the “tennis cabinet.” We talked
about the packers for a while; said “Teddy”: “Mr. Sinclair, I bear no
love for those gentlemen, for I ate the meat they canned for the army in
Cuba.” Presently he fell to discussing the political situation in
Washington. At this time _Cosmopolitan_ was publishing a series of
articles called “The Treason of the Senate,” by the novelist David
Graham Phillips, which revealed the financial connections and the
reactionary activities of various Senators. (The articles were basically
sound, though I had the impression that Phillips, whom I knew rather
well, was longer on adjectives than on facts.) The President called the
roll of these traitors, and told me what he knew about each one. I sat
appalled--what, after all, did Theodore Roosevelt know about me? I was a
stranger, a young socialist agitator, from whom discretion was hardly to
be expected; yet here was the President of the United States discussing
his plans and policies, and pouring out his rage against his
enemies--not even troubling to warn me that our talk was confidential.
I was so much amused by his language that when I left the White House,
the first thing I did was to write out, while I remembered it, his words
about Senator Hale of Maine, whom he called “the Senator from the
Shipbuilding Trust.” If you want to get the full effect of it, sit at a
table, clench your fist, and hit the table at every accented syllable:
“The most in-_nate_-ly and es-_sen_-tial-ly mal-_e_-vo-lent _scoun_-drel
that _God_ _Almight_-_y_ _ev_-er _put_ on _earth_!” I perceived after
this session the origin of what the newspapermen of Washington called
“the Ananias Club.” I was assumed to know that the President’s words
were not meant to be quoted; and if I broke the rule, “Teddy” would say
I was a liar, and the club would have a new member.
A curious aspect of this matter: it was only a few weeks later that
Roosevelt made his famous speech denouncing the “muckrakers.” The speech
named no names but was generally taken to refer to David Graham Phillips
on account of his “Treason of the Senate” articles; and this gave great
comfort to the reactionaries. Yet Phillips in his wildest moment never
said anything against the Old Guard senators more extreme than I had
heard Roosevelt say with his own lips at his own luncheon table.
Needless to say, this experience did not increase my respect for the
game of politics as played in America.
I was sent to see Charles P. Neill, labor commissioner, and James
Bronson Reynolds, a settlement worker, the two men who had been selected
to make the “secret and confidential” investigation. I talked matters
out with them, promised silence, and kept the promise. But when I got
back to Princeton, I found a letter from Chicago telling me it was known
that the President was preparing an investigation of the yards and that
the packers had men working in three shifts, day and night, cleaning
things up. I found also waiting for me a business gentleman with dollar
signs written all over him, trying to interest me in a proposition to
establish an independent packing company and market my name and
reputation to the world. This gentleman haunted my life for a month, and
before he got through he had raised his bid to three hundred thousand
dollars in stock. I have never been sure whether it was a real offer, or
a well-disguised attempt to buy me. If it was the latter, it would be
the only time in my life this had happened; I suppose I could consider
that I had been complimented.
XII
Roosevelt’s commissioners asked me to go to Chicago with them; but I
have never cared to repeat any work once completed. I offered to send a
representative to put the commissioners in touch with the workers in the
yards. For this I selected two socialists whom I had come to know in the
“local” in Trenton, Ella Reeve Bloor and her husband. Mrs. Bloor had
five small children, but that never kept her from sallying forth on
behalf of the cause. She was a little woman, as tireless as a cat; the
war converted her to Bolshevism, and her five children became active
communist workers, and she herself became “Mother Bloor,” gray-haired,
but hardy, and familiar with the insides of a hundred city jails. I paid
the expenses of her and her husband for several weeks, a matter of a
thousand dollars. You will find me dropping a thousand here and a
thousand there, all through the rest of this story; I can figure up
seventy-five of them, all spent on causes--and often spent before I got
them.
The commissioners obtained evidence of practically everything charged in
_The Jungle_, except that I was not able to produce legal proof of men
falling into vats and being rendered into pure leaf lard. There had been
several cases, but always the packers had seen to it that the widows
were returned to the old country. Even so, there was enough to make a
terrific story if it got into the newspapers. It had been Roosevelt’s
idea to reform the meat-inspection service, and put the bill through
Congress without any fuss. But the packers themselves prevented this by
their intrigues against the bill. Finally, with the tacit consent of
the commission, I put the New York _Times_ onto the track of Mr. and
Mrs. Bloor, and the whole story was on the front page next day. So
Roosevelt had to publish the report, and the truth was out.
I moved up to New York and opened an amateur publicity office in a
couple of hotel rooms, with two secretaries working overtime. I gave
interviews and wrote statements for the press until I was dizzy, and
when I lay down to sleep at two o’clock in the morning, my brain would
go on working. It seemed to me that the walls of the mighty fortress of
greed were on the point of cracking; it needed only one push, and then
another, and another. In the end, of course, they stood without a dent;
the packers had lost a few millions, but they quickly made that up by
advertising that their products were now guaranteed pure by the new
government inspection service. A year later Mrs. Bloor went back, this
time with a reporter from the New York _Herald_. They worked in the
yards for many weeks and found all the old forms of graft untouched.
Their story was killed by James Gordon Bennett, as I have related in
_The Brass Check._
In the midst of all this there came to my aid a powerful voice from
abroad. The Honorable Winston Churchill, thirty-two years of age, was a
member of Parliament and a journalist with a large following. He
published a highly favorable two-part article on _The Jungle_ in an
English weekly with the odd name of P.T.O.--the initials, with the first
two reversed, of the editor and publisher, T. P. O’Connor. (Because
O’Connor was an Irishman, you say it “Tay Pay O.”) I quote the first and
last paragraphs of Churchill’s articles, which ran to more than five
thousand words.
When I promised to write a few notes on this book for the first
number of Mr. O’Connor’s new paper, I had an object--I hoped to
make it better known. In the weeks that have passed that object has
disappeared. The book has become famous. It has arrested the eye of
a warm-hearted autocrat; it has agitated the machinery of a State
department; and having passed out of the sedate columns of the
reviewer into leading articles and “latest intelligence,” has
disturbed in the Old World and the New the digestions, and perhaps
the consciences, of mankind....
It is possible that this remarkable book may come to be considered
a factor in far-reaching events. The indignation of millions of
Americans has been aroused. That is a fire which has more than once
burnt with a consuming flame. There are in the Great Republic in
plentiful abundance all the moral forces necessary to such a
purging process. The issue between Capital and Labour is far more
cleanly cut to-day in the United States than in other communities
or in any other age. It may be that in the next few years we shall
be furnished with Transatlantic answers to many of the outstanding
questions of economics and sociology upon whose verge British
political parties stand in perplexity and hesitation. And that is,
after all, an additional reason why English readers should not
shrink from the malodorous recesses of Mr. Upton Sinclair’s
“Jungle.”
In the fifty-six years that have passed, Winston Churchill has become
one of the most famous names in history. I am pleased by what he said
about my book. But I cannot help wondering if he would have written as
freely if I had dealt with the horrors I saw in the slums of London
seven years later, or of conditions in the mining towns of which I
learned from John Burns, who represented the miners in Parliament.
I had now “arrived.” The New York _Evening World_ said, “Not since Byron
awoke one morning to find himself famous has there been such an example
of world-wide celebrity won in a day by a book as has come to Upton
Sinclair.” _The Jungle_ was being translated into seventeen languages,
and was a best seller in America and in Great Britain for six months.
Photographers and reporters journeyed to Princeton, hired hacks and
drove out to my farm, and the neighbors who had been selling me rusty
machinery and broken-down mules suddenly discovered that I had “put them
on the map.” Editors wrote or telegraphed commissions, and I was free to
name my own price. My friend William Dinwiddie, sent by the New York
_Evening World_ to get me to write something for them, first got me to
sign a contract at five cents a word, and then said: “Sinclair, the
first thing you need to learn is to charge.” So I doubled my price to
the next paper--and might just as well have quadrupled it.
How did it feel to be famous? I can truly say that it meant little to me
personally. I got few thrills. I had suffered too much and overstrained
whatever it is that experiences thrills. If I had been thinking about my
own desires, I would have taken the first train to the wilderness and
never come back to crowds and excitement; but I stayed, because “fame”
meant that newspapers and magazines would print a little bit of what I
wanted to say, and by this means the wage slaves in the giant industries
of America would hear some words in their own interest.
XIII
In the third chapter of this narrative, I mentioned one “Jonesy,” a city
inspector of fruit who was the hero of “Jerome’s lemon story.” I
promised to tell another tale about this Jonesy, and here is the place
where it comes in.
I had made some examination of the slaughterhouses in and near New York,
and stated in a newspaper article that conditions in them were no better
than in Chicago. This aroused the head of New York City’s health
department, who denounced me as a “muckraker,” and challenged me to
produce evidence of my charges. The reporters came on the run; and to
one of them, who happened to be a friend, I made a laughing remark: “It
happens that I know a certain inspector of fruit, a subordinate of the
health commissioner’s, who manages to keep a motorcar and a mistress on
a salary of a couple of thousand dollars a year. How do you suppose he
does it?” The remark was not meant for publication, but it appeared in
next morning’s paper.
At about ten o’clock that evening, a reporter called me on the phone at
my hotel. Said he: “I want to give you a tip. The commissioner is taking
you up on that statement about the city fruit inspector who keeps a
motorcar and a mistress. He knows who the man is, of course, but he
figures that you won’t dare to name him because he’s a friend of your
family’s. So he is writing you a letter, calling you a liar, and daring
you to name the man. He has sent the letter to the papers, and I have a
copy of it.”
There was a pretty kettle of fish! As matters actually stood, I had no
legal evidence of Jonesy’s graft--only the word of Jonesy s family, the
frequent family jokes. It would have been awkward to name him--but still
more awkward to let a Tammany politician, who happened to be Jonesy’s
boon companion, destroy the work I was trying to do.
I called Jonesy’s home on the phone, and his wife--whom I knew--told me
he was out. I tried his club, and several other places, and finally
called the wife again. I explained that it was a matter of the greatest
urgency and that I could think of only one thing to do: would she please
give me the telephone number of her husband’s mistress?
So at last I got my victim on the phone and spoke as follows: “The
commissioner has sent to the newspapers a letter challenging me to name
the fruit inspector who is a grafter. I didn’t intend for this to be
published, and I’m sorry it happened, but I refuse to let the
commissioner brand me before the public and destroy my work. If his
challenge is published, I shall name you.”
The tones of Jonesy were what in my dime novels I had been wont to
describe as “icy.” Said he: “I suppose you know there are libel laws in
this country.” Said I: “That’s my lookout. I think I know where I can
get the proofs if I have to. I’m telling you in advance so that you may
stop the commissioner. Call him at once and tell him that if that letter
is published, I shall name you, and name him as your friend and crony.”
What happened after that I never heard. I only know that the letter did
not appear in any New York newspaper.
XIV