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http://www.capitalcentury.com/1906.html
Upton Sinclair was a desperately poor, young socialist hoping to remake the world when he settled down in a tarpaper shack in Princeton Township and penned his Great American Novel. He called it "The Jungle," filled it with page after page of nauseating detail he had researched about the meat-packing industry, and dropped it on an astonished nation in 1906. An instant best-seller, Sinclair's book reeked with the stink of the Chicago stockyards. He told how dead rats were shoveled into sausage-grinding machines; how bribed inspectors looked the other way when diseased cows were slaughtered for beef, and how filth and guts were swept off the floor and packaged as "potted ham."
In short, "The Jungle" did as much as any animal-rights activist of today to turn Americans into vegetarians. But it did more than that. Within months, the aroused -- and gagging -- public demanded sweeping reforms in the meat industry. President Theodore Roosevelt was sickened after reading an advance copy. He called upon Congress to pass a law establishing the Food and Drug Administration and, for the first time, setting up federal inspection standards for meat.
Sinclair, all of 28 years old, had gone overnight from literary failure to the man who took on the mighty "beef trust" -- and won. Visions of ridding America of all its capitalist evils came floating into his head. "It seemed to me that the walls of the mighty fortress of greed were on the point of cracking,” he later wrote. "It needed only one rush, and then another, and another.”
===================================================
Upton Beall Sinclair was, for all his socialist thought, the very model of the all-American kid. He grew up in New York City, the son of poor but proud parents. Barely into his teens, he became a freelancer, writing boy's adventure tales. He eventually pounded out 30,000 words of dime-novel drama every week, even while he attended City College of New York. Sinclair aspired to be a great writer of serious books, but he admitted that all his hack work led him to use too many cliches and exaggerations. Even Sinclair's biographer, William Bloodworth, said the overwrought Sinclair style can be too much to take. "It's not what I would consider great literature," said Bloodworth, the president of Augusta State University in Georgia. "There isn't much character development in his works or subtlety. What he was good at was descriptions ... of turning real-life situations into fiction."
MORE AT LINK
Upton Sinclair was a desperately poor, young socialist hoping to remake the world when he settled down in a tarpaper shack in Princeton Township and penned his Great American Novel. He called it "The Jungle," filled it with page after page of nauseating detail he had researched about the meat-packing industry, and dropped it on an astonished nation in 1906. An instant best-seller, Sinclair's book reeked with the stink of the Chicago stockyards. He told how dead rats were shoveled into sausage-grinding machines; how bribed inspectors looked the other way when diseased cows were slaughtered for beef, and how filth and guts were swept off the floor and packaged as "potted ham."
In short, "The Jungle" did as much as any animal-rights activist of today to turn Americans into vegetarians. But it did more than that. Within months, the aroused -- and gagging -- public demanded sweeping reforms in the meat industry. President Theodore Roosevelt was sickened after reading an advance copy. He called upon Congress to pass a law establishing the Food and Drug Administration and, for the first time, setting up federal inspection standards for meat.
Sinclair, all of 28 years old, had gone overnight from literary failure to the man who took on the mighty "beef trust" -- and won. Visions of ridding America of all its capitalist evils came floating into his head. "It seemed to me that the walls of the mighty fortress of greed were on the point of cracking,” he later wrote. "It needed only one rush, and then another, and another.”
===================================================
Upton Beall Sinclair was, for all his socialist thought, the very model of the all-American kid. He grew up in New York City, the son of poor but proud parents. Barely into his teens, he became a freelancer, writing boy's adventure tales. He eventually pounded out 30,000 words of dime-novel drama every week, even while he attended City College of New York. Sinclair aspired to be a great writer of serious books, but he admitted that all his hack work led him to use too many cliches and exaggerations. Even Sinclair's biographer, William Bloodworth, said the overwrought Sinclair style can be too much to take. "It's not what I would consider great literature," said Bloodworth, the president of Augusta State University in Georgia. "There isn't much character development in his works or subtlety. What he was good at was descriptions ... of turning real-life situations into fiction."
MORE AT LINK
only it's more along this line:
"The Jungle" exposed a lot more than the appalling conditions in the meatpacking industry, although that's what got cleaned up quick. It also exposed some really shady banking practices around mortgages and home ownership, poor immigrants scraping together a down payment, moving in and thinking they'd arrived, not quite realizing that they'd have to scrape together another down payment in three to five yeas when the balloon payments started. Yes, the only mortgages back then were the balloon mortgages we saw repackaged as "interest only" during the final days of the real estate bubble.
Eventually Fanny Mae was started to buy up 30 year fixed rate mortgages and it worked well, too well. Bankers were appalled to see that much interest (and it was only 3% until the late 50s or so) going to the government and clamored to have it privatized. It was, and Freddie Mac was created a year later to give the illusion of competition. Indy Mac was created in the 00s to take on all the junk like balloon mortgages and liar loans.
It was astonishing to me (and everybody else who remembered the rest of "The Jungle"
to see all this stuff taking place again, that no one had learned the lessons of the 1920s and cavalierly discarded the laws passed in the 1930s that had done so well to protect them against predators.
It seems that what you need to sell people the horrors they thought the country had left behind is an ad man who will give them new and catchy titles. Mercantilism? Trickle down! Robber Barons? Job Creators! Embezzlement? Executive Compensation Packages!
We need to find out how to outlaw things so that they stay outlawed. Otherwise, it's all going to be repeated in another 75 years or so.
?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1279646640715
now i crisp up some pancetta and saute shallots and garlic -- then add white wine and lemon juice.
throw the pancetta in when the clams have opened and serve.
it's my favorite meal.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/02/greece-corrupt-clique-kostas-vaxevanis
Kostas Vaxevanis, editor of Hot Doc magazine, was cleared of privacy breach for publishing the names of 2,000 suspected tax evaders. Photograph: Orestis Panagiotou/EPA
Greece is undergoing a crisis of democracy with press censorship at its centre, says the magazine editor in the middle of the media storm that has engulfed Athens. Speaking to the Guardian a day after being cleared of breaching privacy laws, Kostas Vaxevanis said Greece was ruled by a clique of corrupt politicians in thrall to businessmen who owned – and gagged – the media.
"There's a huge problem in Greece, a problem of democracy and essence," he said in his fifth-floor office, surrounded by copies of Hot Doc, the investigative magazine that last week published the names of more than 2,000 high-earning Greeks with bank accounts in Switzerland. "The country is governed by a poisonous combination of politicians, businessmen and journalists who cover one another's backs. Every day laws are changed, or new laws are voted in, to legitimise illegal deeds."
With a substantial chunk of the Greek media owned by magnates or financed by banks, journalists were in effect silenced. "It's tragic. Greeks only ever learn half the truth and that is worse than lies because it has the effect of creating impressions," he said.
Kostas Vaxevanis, editor of Hot Doc magazine, was cleared of privacy breach for publishing the names of 2,000 suspected tax evaders. Photograph: Orestis Panagiotou/EPA
Greece is undergoing a crisis of democracy with press censorship at its centre, says the magazine editor in the middle of the media storm that has engulfed Athens. Speaking to the Guardian a day after being cleared of breaching privacy laws, Kostas Vaxevanis said Greece was ruled by a clique of corrupt politicians in thrall to businessmen who owned – and gagged – the media.
"There's a huge problem in Greece, a problem of democracy and essence," he said in his fifth-floor office, surrounded by copies of Hot Doc, the investigative magazine that last week published the names of more than 2,000 high-earning Greeks with bank accounts in Switzerland. "The country is governed by a poisonous combination of politicians, businessmen and journalists who cover one another's backs. Every day laws are changed, or new laws are voted in, to legitimise illegal deeds."
With a substantial chunk of the Greek media owned by magnates or financed by banks, journalists were in effect silenced. "It's tragic. Greeks only ever learn half the truth and that is worse than lies because it has the effect of creating impressions," he said.
...Sinclair's interests ranged over a wide variety of topics, in his many books and articles. He would receive a Pulitzer Prize for a later novel about Hitler's rise to power. His contemporary, the writer Edmund Wilson, would say of him: "Practically alone among the American writers of his generation, Sinclair put to the American public the fundamental questions raised by capitalism in such a way that they could not escape them."
The nomination of an avowed socialist to head the Democratic party ticket was more than the California establishment could tolerate. Sinclair's radical candidacy was opposed by just about every establishment force in California. The media virtually demonized Sinclair through a concerted propaganda campaign based largely on smears and falsehoods. Sinclair's candidacy also set off a bitter political battle both within the Democratic party and with many groups who were opposed to various aspects of the EPIC plan. Sinclair was denounced as a "Red" and "crackpot" and the Democratic establishment sought to derail his candidacy.
Despite all of this, Upton Sinclair was very nearly elected Governor of California in 1934. He probably would have won, except for two last-minute political errors in judgment. When President Roosevelt announced in June 1934 that he would propose a national social insurance system in the next session of Congress, Sinclair quite reasonably declared that he would be willing to defer his plan in favor of the President's national solution. This was perhaps reasonable, but it was impolitic, as it undermined his strongest issue. Then too, Sinclair felt duty-bound to announce his opposition to the rival Townsend Plan because the Townsend Plan was based on a regressive sales tax. Since the Townsend Plan and the EPIC supporters were often one and the same people, this was in effect an attack on his own core constituency. When the votes were counted, Upton Sinclair got 37% of the vote, the Republican candidate got 48% and a third-party progressive candidate took another 13%. Had it been a two-man race, or had Sinclair been less intellectually honest and more of a politician, he would likely have become Governor of California and the EPIC pension plan might well have become the California model. (In a classic exercise in political hubris, Sinclair detailed his EPIC plan in a book published in 1933, with the confident title "I, Governor of California And How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future." Following the election he would publish another book with the humbled title "I, Candidate for Governor and How I Got Licked."
Undeterred by his loss in the 1934 California election--and not really humbled either--in the 1936 election cycle Sinclair authored another version of his "I, Governor" booklet. This one had an even more expansive aim, and an inflated title to go along with it, "We, People of America and How We Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future."
SEE SINCLAIR'S PLAN FOR SOCIAL SECURITY HERE:
http://www.ssa.gov/history/epic.html
FOR CHAPTER AND VERSE ON THE HISTORY OF SOCIAL SECURITY:
http://www.ssa.gov/history/index.html
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/12470-unraveling-the-future-generations-debt-debate
The economist Brad DeLong recently took on Professor Nick Rowe, of Carlton University, over the bizarrely confused issue of intergenerational debt; in a moment I'll try to offer a new way of explaining why the conventional presentation is all wrong.
First, let me suggest that phrasing in terms of "future generations" can easily become a trap. It's quite possible that debt can raise the consumption of one generation and reduce the consumption of the next generation during the period when members of both generations are still alive. Suppose that after the 2016 election President Santorum tries to buy senior support by giving every American over 65 a gift of newly printed government bonds; then the over-65 generation will be made richer, and everyone under 65 will be made poorer (duh). But that's not what people mean when they speak about the burden of the debt on future generations; what they mean is that the United States as a whole will be poorer, just as a family that runs up debt is poorer thereafter. Does this make any sense? Well, let's do a thought experiment that doesn't, at least initially, seem to have anything to do with debt. Suppose that instead of gifting seniors with bonds, President Santorum passes a constitutional amendment requiring that from now on, each American whose name begins with the letters A through K will receive $5,000 a year from the federal government, with the money to be raised through extra taxes. Does this make America as a whole poorer?
The obvious answer is no, at least not in any direct sense. We're just making a transfer from one group (the L through Z's) to another; total income isn't changed. Now, you could argue that there are indirect costs because raising taxes distorts incentives. But that's a very different story. O.K., you can see what's coming: a debt inherited from the past is, in effect, simply a rule requiring that one group of people — the people who didn't inherit bonds from their parents — make a transfer to another group, the people who did. It has distributional effects, but it does not in any direct sense make the country poorer. Really, this isn't complicated — and the fact that everyone in public life gets it wrong doesn't change the logic.
Foreigners and the Burden of Debt
Another thought experiment: suppose that for some reason the Chinese and a bunch of domestic investors do an asset swap. The Chinese sell off $500 billion of United States Treasuries and buy an equal amount of, say, corporate bonds, while the domestic investors do the reverse. Has the United States become any richer (or any poorer)? Obviously not — as a nation we still owe the same amount to the rest of the world. What this tells us is that when we're trying to assess the burden or lack thereof of debt, foreign ownership of government debt doesn't really matter. What does matter is our net international investment position: the value of the overseas assets owned by all domestic residents minus the value of all domestic assets owned by foreign investors. Now, this ties right in with what Mr. DeLong wrote about the burden of the debt: we'd all agree that deficits make us poorer if they crowd out investment spending — which they would if the economy were near full employment, but won't if it's deeply depressed. All we have to do is realize that net foreign investment — purchases minus sales of assets from and to foreigners — is also a form of investment. Or to put it a bit more simply: sure, budget deficits can make us poorer as a nation if they lead to bigger trade deficits.
Debt Chart(Chart: The New York Times Syndicate)
So far, nothing like this has happened. Look at the chart on this page showing the United States' budget deficit (all levels of government) and the current account deficit, both as a percentage of gross domestic product. Borrowing from abroad is way down, not up, in recent years. Still, you could argue that a bigger budget deficit would, other things being equal, lead to a bigger trade deficit because it would expand the economy and lead to higher imports. In this very limited sense you could tell a burden of deficits story. But surely it's not what debt alarmists have in mind. The bottom line is that while foreign ownership of American assets — not just government debt — is a complication, the common claim that deficits mean that we're selling our birthright to the Chinese makes no sense at all.
BUT SHIPPING A FACTORY'S ENTIRE CAPITAL EQUIPMENT TO CHINA IS A DIFFERENT STORY....WHY DON'T YOU TALK ABOUT THAT ONE, DR. KRUGMAN?
The economist Brad DeLong recently took on Professor Nick Rowe, of Carlton University, over the bizarrely confused issue of intergenerational debt; in a moment I'll try to offer a new way of explaining why the conventional presentation is all wrong.
"In Nick Rowe's world the next generation's taxpayers are taxed to pay off the debt — and so they are losers," Mr. DeLong wrote in a blog post on Oct. 12. "And in Nick Rowe's world the next generation's debt-holders are not gainers."
First, let me suggest that phrasing in terms of "future generations" can easily become a trap. It's quite possible that debt can raise the consumption of one generation and reduce the consumption of the next generation during the period when members of both generations are still alive. Suppose that after the 2016 election President Santorum tries to buy senior support by giving every American over 65 a gift of newly printed government bonds; then the over-65 generation will be made richer, and everyone under 65 will be made poorer (duh). But that's not what people mean when they speak about the burden of the debt on future generations; what they mean is that the United States as a whole will be poorer, just as a family that runs up debt is poorer thereafter. Does this make any sense? Well, let's do a thought experiment that doesn't, at least initially, seem to have anything to do with debt. Suppose that instead of gifting seniors with bonds, President Santorum passes a constitutional amendment requiring that from now on, each American whose name begins with the letters A through K will receive $5,000 a year from the federal government, with the money to be raised through extra taxes. Does this make America as a whole poorer?
The obvious answer is no, at least not in any direct sense. We're just making a transfer from one group (the L through Z's) to another; total income isn't changed. Now, you could argue that there are indirect costs because raising taxes distorts incentives. But that's a very different story. O.K., you can see what's coming: a debt inherited from the past is, in effect, simply a rule requiring that one group of people — the people who didn't inherit bonds from their parents — make a transfer to another group, the people who did. It has distributional effects, but it does not in any direct sense make the country poorer. Really, this isn't complicated — and the fact that everyone in public life gets it wrong doesn't change the logic.
Foreigners and the Burden of Debt
Another thought experiment: suppose that for some reason the Chinese and a bunch of domestic investors do an asset swap. The Chinese sell off $500 billion of United States Treasuries and buy an equal amount of, say, corporate bonds, while the domestic investors do the reverse. Has the United States become any richer (or any poorer)? Obviously not — as a nation we still owe the same amount to the rest of the world. What this tells us is that when we're trying to assess the burden or lack thereof of debt, foreign ownership of government debt doesn't really matter. What does matter is our net international investment position: the value of the overseas assets owned by all domestic residents minus the value of all domestic assets owned by foreign investors. Now, this ties right in with what Mr. DeLong wrote about the burden of the debt: we'd all agree that deficits make us poorer if they crowd out investment spending — which they would if the economy were near full employment, but won't if it's deeply depressed. All we have to do is realize that net foreign investment — purchases minus sales of assets from and to foreigners — is also a form of investment. Or to put it a bit more simply: sure, budget deficits can make us poorer as a nation if they lead to bigger trade deficits.
Debt Chart(Chart: The New York Times Syndicate)
So far, nothing like this has happened. Look at the chart on this page showing the United States' budget deficit (all levels of government) and the current account deficit, both as a percentage of gross domestic product. Borrowing from abroad is way down, not up, in recent years. Still, you could argue that a bigger budget deficit would, other things being equal, lead to a bigger trade deficit because it would expand the economy and lead to higher imports. In this very limited sense you could tell a burden of deficits story. But surely it's not what debt alarmists have in mind. The bottom line is that while foreign ownership of American assets — not just government debt — is a complication, the common claim that deficits mean that we're selling our birthright to the Chinese makes no sense at all.
BUT SHIPPING A FACTORY'S ENTIRE CAPITAL EQUIPMENT TO CHINA IS A DIFFERENT STORY....WHY DON'T YOU TALK ABOUT THAT ONE, DR. KRUGMAN?
http://www.businessinsider.com/ohio-provisional-ballots-recounts-2012-11
In a note out this past week, Citi's FX team called a disputed election the 'biggest political risk' in the world.
They wrote:
We view most of the recent price action in G10 FX (with the possible exception of the USDJPY rally) as being the result of squaring up ahead of the US election and 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. The biggest political risk is the potential that the US result won‘t be known due to the combination of a tight election and re-count/mail-in issues in swing states.
They cited the possibility of a nail-biter in Ohio that doesn't get resolved for days, as mail-in ballots take a long time to get counted.
Now more and more people are talking about this possibility.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/ohio-provisional-ballots-recounts-2012-11#ixzz2BGIkPUOd
In a note out this past week, Citi's FX team called a disputed election the 'biggest political risk' in the world.
They wrote:
We view most of the recent price action in G10 FX (with the possible exception of the USDJPY rally) as being the result of squaring up ahead of the US election and 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. The biggest political risk is the potential that the US result won‘t be known due to the combination of a tight election and re-count/mail-in issues in swing states.
They cited the possibility of a nail-biter in Ohio that doesn't get resolved for days, as mail-in ballots take a long time to get counted.
Now more and more people are talking about this possibility.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/ohio-provisional-ballots-recounts-2012-11#ixzz2BGIkPUOd
http://www.businessinsider.com/zervos-on-boj-decision-losing-independence-2012-11
?maxX=348&maxY=261
Over the past few weeks, there's been a growing buzz about central banks playing a greater role in explicitly serving as funders of government.
The idea that people (journalists and Wall Streeters, mostly) have been talking about is the notion that central banks could buy government debt (as they do in quantitative easing) but then just rip up those bonds, and cancel the debt, with few consequences, except perhaps some inflation (which central banks wants, anyway).
This kind of blatant monetization seems unlikely (especially in countries like the UK and the US, which are borrowing at super-low rates) but the idea of central banks working more closely with their government to stimulate the economy may be on the road to happening.
While the US was distracted by all of the Sandy and election news this week, the Bank of Japan took a shocking step in this direction, according to David Zervos of Jefferies, who notes that the latest easing announcement was a joint production between the Bank of Japan and the Ministry of Finance, amove that never happens:
BoJ policies, by virtually any measure, have been an abject failure. The institution has consistently remained too tight in the face of worsening economic conditions for over 2 decades. And while the economy has had to pay a horrible price for these errors, the tables look like they are about to turn in a nasty way on the institution itself.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/zervos-on-boj-decision-losing-independence-2012-11#ixzz2BGJYwLvH
?maxX=348&maxY=261
Over the past few weeks, there's been a growing buzz about central banks playing a greater role in explicitly serving as funders of government.
The idea that people (journalists and Wall Streeters, mostly) have been talking about is the notion that central banks could buy government debt (as they do in quantitative easing) but then just rip up those bonds, and cancel the debt, with few consequences, except perhaps some inflation (which central banks wants, anyway).
This kind of blatant monetization seems unlikely (especially in countries like the UK and the US, which are borrowing at super-low rates) but the idea of central banks working more closely with their government to stimulate the economy may be on the road to happening.
While the US was distracted by all of the Sandy and election news this week, the Bank of Japan took a shocking step in this direction, according to David Zervos of Jefferies, who notes that the latest easing announcement was a joint production between the Bank of Japan and the Ministry of Finance, amove that never happens:
BoJ policies, by virtually any measure, have been an abject failure. The institution has consistently remained too tight in the face of worsening economic conditions for over 2 decades. And while the economy has had to pay a horrible price for these errors, the tables look like they are about to turn in a nasty way on the institution itself.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/zervos-on-boj-decision-losing-independence-2012-11#ixzz2BGJYwLvH
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/meet-the-most-indebted-man-in-the-world/264413/
He can earn million-dollar gains without anybody knowing. He can execute make-believe trades by sending fake emails from hacked computers. He doesn't always lose money. But when he does, he loses more than $6 billion. He is ... the most indebted man in the world.
Jérôme Kerviel is learning one of life's harsher lessons: It stinks to be $6.3 billion in debt. That's how much his fraudulent trades in 2007 and 2008 cost French bank Société Générale, and how much he has been ordered to pay in restitution -- after he gets out of jail in three years. A judge recently upheld these terms on appeal.
Stay risky, my friends?
But how exactly do you carry out €50 billion ($73 billion at the time) of unauthorized trades? With lots of computer hacking and not a lot of vacation. Kerviel was an arbitrage trader at Société Générale who wanted to take out the "arbitrage" part. In plain English, arbitrage just means taking advantage of discrepancies when things should have the same price, but don't. The idea is to buy the cheaper one, sell the more expensive one, and then wait for them to converge. The beauty is it doesn't matter whether markets go up or down -- you're both long and short -- just that the prices actually converge.
He can earn million-dollar gains without anybody knowing. He can execute make-believe trades by sending fake emails from hacked computers. He doesn't always lose money. But when he does, he loses more than $6 billion. He is ... the most indebted man in the world.
Jérôme Kerviel is learning one of life's harsher lessons: It stinks to be $6.3 billion in debt. That's how much his fraudulent trades in 2007 and 2008 cost French bank Société Générale, and how much he has been ordered to pay in restitution -- after he gets out of jail in three years. A judge recently upheld these terms on appeal.
Stay risky, my friends?
But how exactly do you carry out €50 billion ($73 billion at the time) of unauthorized trades? With lots of computer hacking and not a lot of vacation. Kerviel was an arbitrage trader at Société Générale who wanted to take out the "arbitrage" part. In plain English, arbitrage just means taking advantage of discrepancies when things should have the same price, but don't. The idea is to buy the cheaper one, sell the more expensive one, and then wait for them to converge. The beauty is it doesn't matter whether markets go up or down -- you're both long and short -- just that the prices actually converge.
It's such a typical enginer-type reply....unsuitable for multiple choice quizzes.
And yes, I resemble that remark!
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0920.html
BOUND BROOK, N.J., Nov. 25--Upton Sinclair, who crusaded against the nation's social and economic ills in 90 books, died in his sleep tonight at the Somerset Valley Nursing Home. He was 90 years old.
He is survived by a son, Dr. David Sinclair, a physicist with the Atomic Energy Commission, and a granddaughter, Diana Sinclair.
A funeral service will be held Saturday at 11 A.M. at St. Paul's Episcopal Church here.
Rebel With a Cause
By ALDEN WHITMAN
Upton Beall Sinclair was a rebel with a cause; indeed, a multitude of causes: clean meat, strong trade unions, abolition of child labor, birth control, Prohibition, utopian Socialism, an honest press, morality in business and industry, vegetarianism, mental telepathy and spiritualism, educational reform and civil liberties.
A gracious and benign although spirited and assiduous crusader, he promoted these causes through his books, scores of pamphlets and thousands of speeches and lectures and through campaigns for public office, one of which, his exhilarating and vigorous race for the governorship of California, all but succeeded.
In a moment of proud self-assessment toward the close of his life, he summed up his multiform strivings by saying:
"The English Queen Mary, who failed to hold the French port of Calais, said that when she died the word 'Calais' would be found written on her heart. I don't know whether anyone will care to examine my heart, but if they do they will find two words there--'Social Justice.' For that is what I have believed in and fought for."
Mr. Sinclair's weapon was his pen, and few writers wielded it so tellingly in battles against the social and economic ills of the United States. Although he was not a memorable stylist, his books were graphic, pungent and direct, arousing strong emotions in their readers, many of whom felt impelled to join his struggle against the wrongs he portrayed.
A roll-call of his principal agitational books reflects the major concerns of American social protesters in the first 40 years of this century, when the bulk of his writing was done.
Books Led to Food Act
There was "The Jungle," printed in 1906. The most famous of his works, it exposed not only the grossly unsanitary practices in the Chicago meatpacking industry, but also the sweatshop conditions in which its workers toiled. Arousing the public, the book led to the passage of the first Food and Drug Act.
There was "King Coal" in 1917, recounting the tragedies of a strike at the Rockefeller-controlled Colorado Coal and Iron Company. "The Profits of Religion," issued in 1918, depicted clergymen more concerned with money than religion. The following year there was "The Brass Check," Mr. Sinclair's expose of the venality of a subsidized press. "The Goose-Step," in 1923, dealt with defects in the educational system.
"Oil!," which came out in 1927, attacked exploitation of the California oilfields. It was followed by "Boston," one of the best of his social novels, which told the story of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Finally, there was "The Flivver King," a caustic account of Henry Ford, which was widely used in the union organizing campaign at the Ford Motor Company in 1937.
At the age of 60 Mr. Sinclair turned from straightforward protest and propaganda to historical fiction. And for 10 years, starting in 1939, he wrote the 11 volumes of the Lanny Budd series--a total of 7,364 pages and four million words. It was a prodigious feat, for it retold world history, with an accent on the United States, from 1913 to 1949. The improbable hero was Lanny Budd, journalist, through whose activities Mr. Sinclair recounted the great events of those years.
Won 1943 Pulitzer
One book in the series, "Dragon's Teeth," which dealt with the rise of Hitlerism in Germany, won for the writer his only major literary award, the Pulitzer Prize for 1943. Other prizes eluded him, although he never ceased to hope for the Nobel Prize, for which he said he had once been proposed by George Bernard Shaw.
As a writer, Mr. Sinclair was dismissed by many American critics. He was "mired in melodrama and sentiment," they said, a man who belabored the obvious with "increasingly irrelevant prejudices." But in Europe he was more generously acclaimed, usually as an "American Ibsen of fiction," a reference to the Norwegian realist of the theater.
Mr. Sinclair's works were translated into every major language, and they were sold in the millions. Indeed, he was among the most widely read of American writers abroad. Paradoxically, his books were well regarded in the Soviet Union, toward whose Communist ideology Mr. Sinclair was hostile.
One clue to his enormous popularity was his unabashed devotion to the underdog. Another was his extensive documentation. And a third was a primness that led him to consider sexual scenes and four-letter words as "vileness."
Although Mr. Sinclair's yearly earnings sometimes amounted to only a few hundred dollars, his lifetime total was impressive. "I've earned about a million dollars in my life," he estimated recently, "and I've spent nearly all of it--on causes, on books I thought should be published and on books I thought would sell and didn't."
Mr. Sinclair often declared that he was a Socialist. In fact, he was a member of that party from 1902 to 1934, with an interruption for World War I, which he supported and later condemned. He left the party in 1934 to become a Democrat, but continued to regard himself as a Socialist in spirit.
His Socialism, however, was mild and genteel. He envisioned a cooperative commonwealth for the United States, to be achieved gradually and through the electoral process. He was primarily a moralist; his concern was social injustice, not social analysis. There was no evidence that he was a Marxist, much less an advocate of Communism.
Nonetheless, Mr. Sinclair was frequently pictured as a violent revolutionary, a believer in free love and a social incendiary of the most insidious sort. Yet in speech and thought he was a temperate man, who regretted, as he said, that "I've been lied about."
His voice was soft and slightly Southern, and his face was placid. His blue-gray eyes, behind spectacles, were good-humored. He was an agile 5-foot-7-inches, who played a fair game of tennis into his 70's and who subsisted largely on a diet of brown rice, fresh fruit and celery. Tea, coffee, spirituous liquors and tobacco he shunned as injurious.
In his productive years Mr. Sinclair knew many of the famous people of his times--Albert Einstein, Charles Chapman, Bertrand Russell, Theodore Dreiser, Douglas Fairbanks and Luther Burbank, among scores of others. One of the others was H. L. Mencken, the earthy editor of The American Mercury, with whose political conservatism and defense of drinking Mr. Sinclair often argued.
Born in Baltimore
What attracted these opposites was a sentimental affection for Baltimore, where Mr. Sinclair was born Sept. 20, 1878. He was the only child of Upton Beall Sinclair, the scion of a distinguished Southern family, and Priscilla Harden Sinclair. The father was, in succession, a salesman of whisky, straw hats and men's clothing, who, his son recalled, "could never get away from drink." His mother's married life "was poisoned by alcohol" as his father drank himself to death.
"It made an indelible impression upon my childish soul," Mr. Sinclair wrote in his autobiography, "and is the reason why I am a Prohibitionist."
The family alternated between poverty and moderate wealth. Explaining the effect of this on his career, Mr. Sinclair once remarked:
"Readers of my novels know that I have one favorite theme, the contrast between the social classes; there are characters from both worlds, the rich and the poor, and the plots are contrived to carry you from one to the other. The explanation is that as far back as I can remember, my life was a series of Cinderella transformations; one night I would be sleeping on a vermin-ridden sofa in a lodging house, and the next night under silken coverlets in a fashionable home. It all depended on whether my father had the money for that week's board."
Shy, precocious and introspective, Upton taught himself to read at the age of 5, and his mother supervised his education until he was 10 and entered school. "I knew everything but arithmetic," he said.
Lived in New York
By that time the Sinclairs were living in New York, and the boy went to grammar school, completing eight grades in less than two years. He had to repeat the last grade to mark time for admission to City College, then chiefly a high school, which he entered a few days before his 14th birthday.
While there he made his debut as a professional writer. "I wrote a story about a pet bird," he recalled, "making it serve to prove the innocence of a colored boy accused of arson." Argosy magazine paid him $25 for the yarn. He went on from that to selling jokes to Life, Judge and Puck, and when he graduated from City College after five years he was a full-fledged pulp writer. At one point he was producing stories simultaneously about life at West Point and at Annapolis for $40 a story.
Each story was about 30,000 words long. Then, as later, he had an awesome fecundity. When he was attending lectures at Columbia after his City College days, he wrote 8,000 words a day, Sundays included. "I kept two secretaries working all the time, taking dictation one day and transcribing the next," he said.
Mr. Sinclair was equally frenzied as a reader. Over one Christmas holiday of two weeks he read all of Shakespeare and all the poetry of Milton. In addition, at Columbia, he taught himself to read French in six weeks, and galloped through Musset, Daudet, Hugo, Flaubert, Balzac and Zola. He also taught himself Italian and, later, Esperanto and German.
Mr. Sinclair's introduction to practical politics occurred in his student days when he helped campaign for William Travers Jerome, the anti-Tammany Hall reformer. "I learned very quickly," he wrote in disillusion, "for my knight-hero, Jerome, was elected triumphantly and did absolutely nothing, and all forms of graft went on in New York City just as they always had."
Wherever Mr. Sinclair looked he saw corruption triumphant and virtue a dauntless but battered cause. "The vision of life that had come to me must be made known to the world, in order that men and women might be won from their stupid and wasteful ways of life," he thought. "Long ago my friend Mike Gold wrote me a letter, scolding me severely for what he called my 'Jesus complex'; I answered that the world needs a Jesus more than it needs anything else."
Gave Up Potboilers
But before Mr. Sinclair embarked upon his mission he decided to give up potboilers for more substantial literature.
His first effort, "Springtime and Harvest," was a callow novel about a woman redeemed by high and noble love. It was privately published in 1901 and then reissued as "King Midas" by Funk & Wagnalls. On the strength of its middling success he married Miss Meta H. Fuller.
The union, beset by poverty and naivete, ended in 1911 in a blaze of scandal. Mrs. Sinclair fell in love with Harry Kemp, the poet, and Mr. Sinclair, then in the Netherlands, obtained a divorce. In referring to this marriage in later writings, the author called himself Thyrsis and his wife Corydon, the appellations of two rustics in Virgil's "Eclogues."
Mr. Sinclair's formal introduction to Socialism was effected in 1902 by Leonard D. Abbott, also a writer, who gave him party pamphlets to read. He then met George D. Herron, an influential Socialist, and Gaylord Wilshire, who ran a Socialist periodical for which Mr. Sinclair wrote. His broadsides also appeared in Appeal to Reason, a Socialist weekly with more than a half-million circulation.
Meantime, Upton and Meta Sinclair and their infant son David moved to a shack near Princeton, N. J., where Mr. Sinclair wrote a Civil War novel that impressed the editor of Appeal to Reason, who urged him to write a novel about wage slavery. Thus encouraged, he went to Chicago in 1904 for seven weeks of research in the packinghouse district.
'Tears and Anguish'
The result was "The Jungle," a novel centering on the life of a Lithuanian immigrant family, which he wrote "with tears and anguish" in three months. Five publishers rejected it before Doubleday, Page & Co. took it. Published in February, 1906, the book's descriptions of the filthy conditions in the meat plants stirred the country. "I aimed at the public's heart," the author said, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach."
Within a month or so, President Theodore Roosevelt was receiving 100 letters a day demanding a Federal cleanup of the meat industry. Roosevelt called Mr. Sinclair to the White House for a firsthand account of his findings, and ordered an investigation that culminated in the first Federal pure-food statute.
"The Jungle" brought its author instant fame. Photographed and interviewed, he kept up a drumfire of charges about what was then called the Beef Trust. The prodding was intense enough to annoy Roosevelt, who sent a message to Mr. Sinclair's publisher. "Tell Sinclair to go home and let me run the country for a while," it said.
(Fame from "The Jungle" endured into 1967, when the aged writer was again invited to the White House, this time to witness the singing of a new pure-food law.)
With some of his earnings from "The Jungle," Mr. Sinclair helped organize the Helicon Home Colony, an experiment in high-minded communal living that borrowed its name from the legendary home of the Greek Muses. The professors, writers, poets and critics established their Parnassian colony on the Palisades, near Fort Lee, N. J., and it lasted from November, 1906, to the following March, when it was destroyed by fire. Often depicted as a Bohemian colony, Helicon Hall, as it was known, was actually an exercise in the austere life.
After a trip to California and further writing, Mr. Sinclair repaired to Bernarr Macfadden's health institute at Battle Creek, Mich., for attention to his digestive processes. He had been bothered by stomach ailments for some time until he found his guru in Mr. Macfadden, a self-styled body culturist and a diet faddist. Mr. Macfadden convinced his patient of the merits of periodic fasting and of such gastronomic combinations as sour milk and dates. The grateful writer never ceased his public enthusiasm for nutritional oddities.
With the breakup of his marriage, Mr. Sinclair traveled in Europe, to whose Socialist-oriented literary lights he was a hero to be feted. Returning home after his divorce, he married Miss Mary Craig Kimbrough, a gentle Mississippian, with whom he lived in contentment until her death in 1961. His third wife was the former Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Willis, who died in 1967.
The writer forsook his desk briefly in 1912 to engage in the celebrated strike of silk workers in Paterson, N. J. In this he was joined by the leading radicals of the day, who included Big Bill Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, later a leading Communist; Carlo Tresca, the anarchist; and John Reed, the future Communist. About that time he also met Walter Lippmann, the columnist, who as a Harvard student had belonged to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, which Mr. Sinclair had founded with Jack London in 1905.
Supported Role in War
Mr. Sinclair's devotion to the Socialist party was suspended when the United States entered World War I in 1917. Not only did he resign, but he also put out a magazine, Upton Sinclair's, to support American entry into the conflict. Lasting 10 issues, it attained a circulation of 10,000 copies a month until it was discontinued in 1919.
The author later regretted his support of the war, and he was bitterly disappointed by the peace settlement. Nonetheless, the incident embittered many Socialists, to whom Mr. Sinclair became a renegade. He subsequently was readmitted to the party, which edged to the right in the postwar years, but his activity in it was minimal.
Mr. Sinclair's fame, which had dwindled during the war, was rehabilitated by "The Brass Check," his book about the suppression and distortion of news by what he called "the big-business press" and by the news agencies. The title was an allusion to prostitution, since a brothel customer at that time bought a brass marker from the madam and gave it to the prostitute as evidence that he had paid in advance for her favors.
Turned down by commercial publishers, Mr. Sinclair serialized his documented indictment in Appeal to Reason and published it in book form at his own expense, including one printing on brown wrapping paper. "The Brass Check," its author recalled, "created a tremendous sensation," and it shamed many newspapers into raising their ethical standards.
In the nineteen-twenties Mr. Sinclair was one of the first board members of the American Civil Liberties Union and a founder of its branch in Southern California, where he had gone to live and to write. He produced two books advocating educational reform, another analyzing world literature, and another on the oil industry.
"Oil!," which contained some chapters about Hollywood, had the distinction of being banned in Boston because a character in it mentioned the phrase "birth control."
The author visited that city to cash in on the publicity and came to meet Bartolomeo Vanzetti ("one of the wisest and kindest persons I ever knew" who, with Nicola Sacco, was executed in 1927 for a payroll robbery that many historians believe they did not commit. The Sacco-Vanzetti case, the cause celebre of the twenties, was retold in "Boston," one of Mr. Sinclair's finest novels.
In the early thirties, Mr. Sinclair was converted to a belief in psychic phenomena and wrote a book about them, "Mental Radio," that he felt important enough to reprint in 1962. At the same time he wrote "The Wet Parade," an impassioned plea for Prohibition. And from materials furnished by William Fox, the motion picture tycoon, he wrote "Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox," a partisan exposition of Mr. Fox's many business troubles in Hollywood. As a spin-off of his interest in the movies, Mr. Sinclair, in 1933, was a sponsor of Sergei Eisenstein's classic documentary, "Thunder Over Mexico."
Although Mr. Sinclair had often sought office as a Socialist--the House in 1906 and 1920, the Senate in 1922 and Governor of California in 1926, 1930 and 1934--his race in 1934 was his most dazzling. Of a population of seven million in that year, California had a million out of work, its public relief funds were exhausted and its industries were all but stilled.
"To me the remedy was obvious," Mr. Sinclair said. "The factories were idle and the workers had no money. Let them be put to work on the state's credit and produce goods for their own use, and set up a system of exchange by which the goods could be distributed."
Politicians Astonished
This was the essence of EPIC--End Poverty in California--the platform on which Mr. Sinclair ran in the Democratic primary. To the astonishment and shock of professional politicians, he won by 436,000 votes.
When Mr. Sinclair faced Frank E. Merriam, the incumbent Republican, in the general election, it seemed obvious to many observers that "Uppie," as the Democrat was affectionately called, was going to win. The conservative Los Angeles Times, however, was instrumental in bringing about his defeat by conducting an inflammatory campaign that pictured him as a man who would not only "sovietize" the state but also introduce free love and the nationalization of children.
That newspaper and others succeeded in frightening substantial numbers of conventional voters. The movie industry, moreover, threatened its employes with dismissal if they voted for Mr. Sinclair. In addition, the national Democratic party quietly worked to scuttle the EPIC movement. In the face of these factors, Mr. Sinclair's zealous campaigning with an amateur organization rolled up a remarkable total of 879,000 votes, about 200,000 short of victory.
Writing Pace Slackened
Retiring from electoral politics for good, he devoted his time to further writing--a one-act play about his cousin, Wallis Warfield, now the Dutchess of Windsor; a novel about Henry Ford; and the Lanny Budd series. His pace slackened in the nineteen-fifties to only eight books--one a temperance plea--in 10 years. In 1960 he published some of his letters, and his autobiography appeared in 1962.
Looking back on his life a couple of years ago, Mr. Sinclair concluded it had been one of accomplishment. Indeed, he specified 10 achievements: clean meat; better newspapers; the ending of "wage slavery" in the Rocky Mountain mining camps; spurring an interest in psychic phenomena; helping to organize the American Civil Liberties Union; his EPIC campaign; his democratic influence in Japan, where his books were widely circulated; his campaign against drinking; his founding of the college Socialist society, and the Lanny Budd books.
"In politics and economics," he summed up, "I believe what I have believed ever since I discovered the Socialist movement at the beginning of this century. I have incorporated those beliefs in a hundred books and pamphlets and numberless articles. My books have been translated into 40 languages, and millions of people have read them.
"What those millions have found is not only a defense of social justice but an unwavering conviction that true social justice can be achieved and maintained only through the democratic process."
BOUND BROOK, N.J., Nov. 25--Upton Sinclair, who crusaded against the nation's social and economic ills in 90 books, died in his sleep tonight at the Somerset Valley Nursing Home. He was 90 years old.
He is survived by a son, Dr. David Sinclair, a physicist with the Atomic Energy Commission, and a granddaughter, Diana Sinclair.
A funeral service will be held Saturday at 11 A.M. at St. Paul's Episcopal Church here.
Rebel With a Cause
By ALDEN WHITMAN
Upton Beall Sinclair was a rebel with a cause; indeed, a multitude of causes: clean meat, strong trade unions, abolition of child labor, birth control, Prohibition, utopian Socialism, an honest press, morality in business and industry, vegetarianism, mental telepathy and spiritualism, educational reform and civil liberties.
A gracious and benign although spirited and assiduous crusader, he promoted these causes through his books, scores of pamphlets and thousands of speeches and lectures and through campaigns for public office, one of which, his exhilarating and vigorous race for the governorship of California, all but succeeded.
In a moment of proud self-assessment toward the close of his life, he summed up his multiform strivings by saying:
"The English Queen Mary, who failed to hold the French port of Calais, said that when she died the word 'Calais' would be found written on her heart. I don't know whether anyone will care to examine my heart, but if they do they will find two words there--'Social Justice.' For that is what I have believed in and fought for."
Mr. Sinclair's weapon was his pen, and few writers wielded it so tellingly in battles against the social and economic ills of the United States. Although he was not a memorable stylist, his books were graphic, pungent and direct, arousing strong emotions in their readers, many of whom felt impelled to join his struggle against the wrongs he portrayed.
A roll-call of his principal agitational books reflects the major concerns of American social protesters in the first 40 years of this century, when the bulk of his writing was done.
Books Led to Food Act
There was "The Jungle," printed in 1906. The most famous of his works, it exposed not only the grossly unsanitary practices in the Chicago meatpacking industry, but also the sweatshop conditions in which its workers toiled. Arousing the public, the book led to the passage of the first Food and Drug Act.
There was "King Coal" in 1917, recounting the tragedies of a strike at the Rockefeller-controlled Colorado Coal and Iron Company. "The Profits of Religion," issued in 1918, depicted clergymen more concerned with money than religion. The following year there was "The Brass Check," Mr. Sinclair's expose of the venality of a subsidized press. "The Goose-Step," in 1923, dealt with defects in the educational system.
"Oil!," which came out in 1927, attacked exploitation of the California oilfields. It was followed by "Boston," one of the best of his social novels, which told the story of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Finally, there was "The Flivver King," a caustic account of Henry Ford, which was widely used in the union organizing campaign at the Ford Motor Company in 1937.
At the age of 60 Mr. Sinclair turned from straightforward protest and propaganda to historical fiction. And for 10 years, starting in 1939, he wrote the 11 volumes of the Lanny Budd series--a total of 7,364 pages and four million words. It was a prodigious feat, for it retold world history, with an accent on the United States, from 1913 to 1949. The improbable hero was Lanny Budd, journalist, through whose activities Mr. Sinclair recounted the great events of those years.
Won 1943 Pulitzer
One book in the series, "Dragon's Teeth," which dealt with the rise of Hitlerism in Germany, won for the writer his only major literary award, the Pulitzer Prize for 1943. Other prizes eluded him, although he never ceased to hope for the Nobel Prize, for which he said he had once been proposed by George Bernard Shaw.
As a writer, Mr. Sinclair was dismissed by many American critics. He was "mired in melodrama and sentiment," they said, a man who belabored the obvious with "increasingly irrelevant prejudices." But in Europe he was more generously acclaimed, usually as an "American Ibsen of fiction," a reference to the Norwegian realist of the theater.
Mr. Sinclair's works were translated into every major language, and they were sold in the millions. Indeed, he was among the most widely read of American writers abroad. Paradoxically, his books were well regarded in the Soviet Union, toward whose Communist ideology Mr. Sinclair was hostile.
One clue to his enormous popularity was his unabashed devotion to the underdog. Another was his extensive documentation. And a third was a primness that led him to consider sexual scenes and four-letter words as "vileness."
Although Mr. Sinclair's yearly earnings sometimes amounted to only a few hundred dollars, his lifetime total was impressive. "I've earned about a million dollars in my life," he estimated recently, "and I've spent nearly all of it--on causes, on books I thought should be published and on books I thought would sell and didn't."
Mr. Sinclair often declared that he was a Socialist. In fact, he was a member of that party from 1902 to 1934, with an interruption for World War I, which he supported and later condemned. He left the party in 1934 to become a Democrat, but continued to regard himself as a Socialist in spirit.
His Socialism, however, was mild and genteel. He envisioned a cooperative commonwealth for the United States, to be achieved gradually and through the electoral process. He was primarily a moralist; his concern was social injustice, not social analysis. There was no evidence that he was a Marxist, much less an advocate of Communism.
Nonetheless, Mr. Sinclair was frequently pictured as a violent revolutionary, a believer in free love and a social incendiary of the most insidious sort. Yet in speech and thought he was a temperate man, who regretted, as he said, that "I've been lied about."
His voice was soft and slightly Southern, and his face was placid. His blue-gray eyes, behind spectacles, were good-humored. He was an agile 5-foot-7-inches, who played a fair game of tennis into his 70's and who subsisted largely on a diet of brown rice, fresh fruit and celery. Tea, coffee, spirituous liquors and tobacco he shunned as injurious.
In his productive years Mr. Sinclair knew many of the famous people of his times--Albert Einstein, Charles Chapman, Bertrand Russell, Theodore Dreiser, Douglas Fairbanks and Luther Burbank, among scores of others. One of the others was H. L. Mencken, the earthy editor of The American Mercury, with whose political conservatism and defense of drinking Mr. Sinclair often argued.
Born in Baltimore
What attracted these opposites was a sentimental affection for Baltimore, where Mr. Sinclair was born Sept. 20, 1878. He was the only child of Upton Beall Sinclair, the scion of a distinguished Southern family, and Priscilla Harden Sinclair. The father was, in succession, a salesman of whisky, straw hats and men's clothing, who, his son recalled, "could never get away from drink." His mother's married life "was poisoned by alcohol" as his father drank himself to death.
"It made an indelible impression upon my childish soul," Mr. Sinclair wrote in his autobiography, "and is the reason why I am a Prohibitionist."
The family alternated between poverty and moderate wealth. Explaining the effect of this on his career, Mr. Sinclair once remarked:
"Readers of my novels know that I have one favorite theme, the contrast between the social classes; there are characters from both worlds, the rich and the poor, and the plots are contrived to carry you from one to the other. The explanation is that as far back as I can remember, my life was a series of Cinderella transformations; one night I would be sleeping on a vermin-ridden sofa in a lodging house, and the next night under silken coverlets in a fashionable home. It all depended on whether my father had the money for that week's board."
Shy, precocious and introspective, Upton taught himself to read at the age of 5, and his mother supervised his education until he was 10 and entered school. "I knew everything but arithmetic," he said.
Lived in New York
By that time the Sinclairs were living in New York, and the boy went to grammar school, completing eight grades in less than two years. He had to repeat the last grade to mark time for admission to City College, then chiefly a high school, which he entered a few days before his 14th birthday.
While there he made his debut as a professional writer. "I wrote a story about a pet bird," he recalled, "making it serve to prove the innocence of a colored boy accused of arson." Argosy magazine paid him $25 for the yarn. He went on from that to selling jokes to Life, Judge and Puck, and when he graduated from City College after five years he was a full-fledged pulp writer. At one point he was producing stories simultaneously about life at West Point and at Annapolis for $40 a story.
Each story was about 30,000 words long. Then, as later, he had an awesome fecundity. When he was attending lectures at Columbia after his City College days, he wrote 8,000 words a day, Sundays included. "I kept two secretaries working all the time, taking dictation one day and transcribing the next," he said.
Mr. Sinclair was equally frenzied as a reader. Over one Christmas holiday of two weeks he read all of Shakespeare and all the poetry of Milton. In addition, at Columbia, he taught himself to read French in six weeks, and galloped through Musset, Daudet, Hugo, Flaubert, Balzac and Zola. He also taught himself Italian and, later, Esperanto and German.
Mr. Sinclair's introduction to practical politics occurred in his student days when he helped campaign for William Travers Jerome, the anti-Tammany Hall reformer. "I learned very quickly," he wrote in disillusion, "for my knight-hero, Jerome, was elected triumphantly and did absolutely nothing, and all forms of graft went on in New York City just as they always had."
Wherever Mr. Sinclair looked he saw corruption triumphant and virtue a dauntless but battered cause. "The vision of life that had come to me must be made known to the world, in order that men and women might be won from their stupid and wasteful ways of life," he thought. "Long ago my friend Mike Gold wrote me a letter, scolding me severely for what he called my 'Jesus complex'; I answered that the world needs a Jesus more than it needs anything else."
Gave Up Potboilers
But before Mr. Sinclair embarked upon his mission he decided to give up potboilers for more substantial literature.
His first effort, "Springtime and Harvest," was a callow novel about a woman redeemed by high and noble love. It was privately published in 1901 and then reissued as "King Midas" by Funk & Wagnalls. On the strength of its middling success he married Miss Meta H. Fuller.
The union, beset by poverty and naivete, ended in 1911 in a blaze of scandal. Mrs. Sinclair fell in love with Harry Kemp, the poet, and Mr. Sinclair, then in the Netherlands, obtained a divorce. In referring to this marriage in later writings, the author called himself Thyrsis and his wife Corydon, the appellations of two rustics in Virgil's "Eclogues."
Mr. Sinclair's formal introduction to Socialism was effected in 1902 by Leonard D. Abbott, also a writer, who gave him party pamphlets to read. He then met George D. Herron, an influential Socialist, and Gaylord Wilshire, who ran a Socialist periodical for which Mr. Sinclair wrote. His broadsides also appeared in Appeal to Reason, a Socialist weekly with more than a half-million circulation.
Meantime, Upton and Meta Sinclair and their infant son David moved to a shack near Princeton, N. J., where Mr. Sinclair wrote a Civil War novel that impressed the editor of Appeal to Reason, who urged him to write a novel about wage slavery. Thus encouraged, he went to Chicago in 1904 for seven weeks of research in the packinghouse district.
'Tears and Anguish'
The result was "The Jungle," a novel centering on the life of a Lithuanian immigrant family, which he wrote "with tears and anguish" in three months. Five publishers rejected it before Doubleday, Page & Co. took it. Published in February, 1906, the book's descriptions of the filthy conditions in the meat plants stirred the country. "I aimed at the public's heart," the author said, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach."
Within a month or so, President Theodore Roosevelt was receiving 100 letters a day demanding a Federal cleanup of the meat industry. Roosevelt called Mr. Sinclair to the White House for a firsthand account of his findings, and ordered an investigation that culminated in the first Federal pure-food statute.
"The Jungle" brought its author instant fame. Photographed and interviewed, he kept up a drumfire of charges about what was then called the Beef Trust. The prodding was intense enough to annoy Roosevelt, who sent a message to Mr. Sinclair's publisher. "Tell Sinclair to go home and let me run the country for a while," it said.
(Fame from "The Jungle" endured into 1967, when the aged writer was again invited to the White House, this time to witness the singing of a new pure-food law.)
With some of his earnings from "The Jungle," Mr. Sinclair helped organize the Helicon Home Colony, an experiment in high-minded communal living that borrowed its name from the legendary home of the Greek Muses. The professors, writers, poets and critics established their Parnassian colony on the Palisades, near Fort Lee, N. J., and it lasted from November, 1906, to the following March, when it was destroyed by fire. Often depicted as a Bohemian colony, Helicon Hall, as it was known, was actually an exercise in the austere life.
After a trip to California and further writing, Mr. Sinclair repaired to Bernarr Macfadden's health institute at Battle Creek, Mich., for attention to his digestive processes. He had been bothered by stomach ailments for some time until he found his guru in Mr. Macfadden, a self-styled body culturist and a diet faddist. Mr. Macfadden convinced his patient of the merits of periodic fasting and of such gastronomic combinations as sour milk and dates. The grateful writer never ceased his public enthusiasm for nutritional oddities.
With the breakup of his marriage, Mr. Sinclair traveled in Europe, to whose Socialist-oriented literary lights he was a hero to be feted. Returning home after his divorce, he married Miss Mary Craig Kimbrough, a gentle Mississippian, with whom he lived in contentment until her death in 1961. His third wife was the former Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Willis, who died in 1967.
The writer forsook his desk briefly in 1912 to engage in the celebrated strike of silk workers in Paterson, N. J. In this he was joined by the leading radicals of the day, who included Big Bill Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, later a leading Communist; Carlo Tresca, the anarchist; and John Reed, the future Communist. About that time he also met Walter Lippmann, the columnist, who as a Harvard student had belonged to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, which Mr. Sinclair had founded with Jack London in 1905.
Supported Role in War
Mr. Sinclair's devotion to the Socialist party was suspended when the United States entered World War I in 1917. Not only did he resign, but he also put out a magazine, Upton Sinclair's, to support American entry into the conflict. Lasting 10 issues, it attained a circulation of 10,000 copies a month until it was discontinued in 1919.
The author later regretted his support of the war, and he was bitterly disappointed by the peace settlement. Nonetheless, the incident embittered many Socialists, to whom Mr. Sinclair became a renegade. He subsequently was readmitted to the party, which edged to the right in the postwar years, but his activity in it was minimal.
Mr. Sinclair's fame, which had dwindled during the war, was rehabilitated by "The Brass Check," his book about the suppression and distortion of news by what he called "the big-business press" and by the news agencies. The title was an allusion to prostitution, since a brothel customer at that time bought a brass marker from the madam and gave it to the prostitute as evidence that he had paid in advance for her favors.
Turned down by commercial publishers, Mr. Sinclair serialized his documented indictment in Appeal to Reason and published it in book form at his own expense, including one printing on brown wrapping paper. "The Brass Check," its author recalled, "created a tremendous sensation," and it shamed many newspapers into raising their ethical standards.
In the nineteen-twenties Mr. Sinclair was one of the first board members of the American Civil Liberties Union and a founder of its branch in Southern California, where he had gone to live and to write. He produced two books advocating educational reform, another analyzing world literature, and another on the oil industry.
"Oil!," which contained some chapters about Hollywood, had the distinction of being banned in Boston because a character in it mentioned the phrase "birth control."
The author visited that city to cash in on the publicity and came to meet Bartolomeo Vanzetti ("one of the wisest and kindest persons I ever knew"
who, with Nicola Sacco, was executed in 1927 for a payroll robbery that many historians believe they did not commit. The Sacco-Vanzetti case, the cause celebre of the twenties, was retold in "Boston," one of Mr. Sinclair's finest novels.
In the early thirties, Mr. Sinclair was converted to a belief in psychic phenomena and wrote a book about them, "Mental Radio," that he felt important enough to reprint in 1962. At the same time he wrote "The Wet Parade," an impassioned plea for Prohibition. And from materials furnished by William Fox, the motion picture tycoon, he wrote "Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox," a partisan exposition of Mr. Fox's many business troubles in Hollywood. As a spin-off of his interest in the movies, Mr. Sinclair, in 1933, was a sponsor of Sergei Eisenstein's classic documentary, "Thunder Over Mexico."
Although Mr. Sinclair had often sought office as a Socialist--the House in 1906 and 1920, the Senate in 1922 and Governor of California in 1926, 1930 and 1934--his race in 1934 was his most dazzling. Of a population of seven million in that year, California had a million out of work, its public relief funds were exhausted and its industries were all but stilled.
"To me the remedy was obvious," Mr. Sinclair said. "The factories were idle and the workers had no money. Let them be put to work on the state's credit and produce goods for their own use, and set up a system of exchange by which the goods could be distributed."
Politicians Astonished
This was the essence of EPIC--End Poverty in California--the platform on which Mr. Sinclair ran in the Democratic primary. To the astonishment and shock of professional politicians, he won by 436,000 votes.
When Mr. Sinclair faced Frank E. Merriam, the incumbent Republican, in the general election, it seemed obvious to many observers that "Uppie," as the Democrat was affectionately called, was going to win. The conservative Los Angeles Times, however, was instrumental in bringing about his defeat by conducting an inflammatory campaign that pictured him as a man who would not only "sovietize" the state but also introduce free love and the nationalization of children.
That newspaper and others succeeded in frightening substantial numbers of conventional voters. The movie industry, moreover, threatened its employes with dismissal if they voted for Mr. Sinclair. In addition, the national Democratic party quietly worked to scuttle the EPIC movement. In the face of these factors, Mr. Sinclair's zealous campaigning with an amateur organization rolled up a remarkable total of 879,000 votes, about 200,000 short of victory.
Writing Pace Slackened
Retiring from electoral politics for good, he devoted his time to further writing--a one-act play about his cousin, Wallis Warfield, now the Dutchess of Windsor; a novel about Henry Ford; and the Lanny Budd series. His pace slackened in the nineteen-fifties to only eight books--one a temperance plea--in 10 years. In 1960 he published some of his letters, and his autobiography appeared in 1962.
Looking back on his life a couple of years ago, Mr. Sinclair concluded it had been one of accomplishment. Indeed, he specified 10 achievements: clean meat; better newspapers; the ending of "wage slavery" in the Rocky Mountain mining camps; spurring an interest in psychic phenomena; helping to organize the American Civil Liberties Union; his EPIC campaign; his democratic influence in Japan, where his books were widely circulated; his campaign against drinking; his founding of the college Socialist society, and the Lanny Budd books.
"In politics and economics," he summed up, "I believe what I have believed ever since I discovered the Socialist movement at the beginning of this century. I have incorporated those beliefs in a hundred books and pamphlets and numberless articles. My books have been translated into 40 languages, and millions of people have read them.
"What those millions have found is not only a defense of social justice but an unwavering conviction that true social justice can be achieved and maintained only through the democratic process."
