Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair

PROLOGUE
 
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana
October 19, 1963
 
 
 
In 1895, when Upton Sinclair was sixteen years old, his English teacher in New York commended him for giving a speech that demonstrated “earnestness, feeling, spirit, and appreciation of his piece.” Particularly appealing to his classmates, the perceptive teacher noted, was the young scholar’s “freedom from affectation.”
 
Upton Sinclair’s audience on this autumn evening in 1963 was much larger than it had been in 1895—an overflow crowd of more than three thousand, mostly students. At eighty-five years old, his slender body was stooped. The bright stage lights highlighted his thinning white hair, his age spots, his prominent beak of a nose and the round wire-rimmed spectacles that perched on it. His voice, as he announced the subject of his talk— “Changing America and What Will Happen to You if You Try”—was thin and high, but it was strong enough to hold the hall’s attention for the next ninety minutes. Not once during that time did Sinclair refer to notes. They were not necessary, because he was doing what he had done for most of his life—telling a story that was close to his heart with “earnestness, feeling, spirit, and appreciation of his piece.”
 
Sinclair’s story was an appealing one for a generation of college students whose idealism had recently been aroused by the election as president of the energetic young John F. Kennedy. Simply put, it was that one man, fired by the zeal to end injustice, could do it—or at least he could come close and, in America, as opposed to most other countries, live happily ever after. The old warrior’s talk concerned his various battles with captains of industry. Of these, the best known and most important was his first, with Ogden Armour, the Chicago meatpacker whose plant Sinclair made the key setting for The Jungle in 1906. That book, which helped secure the subsequent passage of Pure Food and Drug legislation, would by itself have guaranteed Sinclair a niche in American history. Indeed, it was for The Jungle, published when he was just twenty-seven years old, that most of his audience in Bloomington knew him.
 
For a time it appeared as though The Jungle would mark the end as well as the beginning of Sinclair’s career. He was dismissed by some critics as a mere “muckraker,” one of those pesky investigative reporters bent on stirring up trouble. He also had trouble handling his subsequent renown. After all, he had been praised in a review of The Jungle by Winston Churchill as a man of “very great gifts” and even invited to chat with Teddy Roosevelt at the White House. He became entangled in several communes and was unfairly tarred as a debauched advocate of free love. His first wife ran off with his best friend, an affair that his new notoriety guaranteed was front-page tabloid news. His second wife saw to it that he was estranged for decades from his only child—now a distinguished physicist seated in the front row of the audience. For a long time he was regarded as a one-book wonder, producing a string of failed novels over the next fifteen years.
 
But Sinclair bounced back, as he would do throughout his life—first with a series of popular nonfiction attacks in the 1920s on religion, the press, and education in modern America, and then as a politician, nearly becoming the governor of California in 1934. His true fulfillment as a writer would come after he turned sixty. Having spent a lifetime as a self-described socialist propagandist, he turned to historical fiction in a series of eleven novels about the wars of the twentieth century. His appealing hero Lanny Budd, through whose eyes these stories are told, knew everyone from Hitler and Göring to FDR and Truman. In 1943 Sinclair won the Pulitzer Prize for Dragon’s Teeth, which described the rise of Nazi Germany.
 
Even the intrepid Lanny was a relatively passive observer compared to his creator, who both witnessed and shaped the history of the twentieth century. As a young man, Upton Sinclair knew Mark Twain, Jack London, and Theodore Roosevelt. In his middle years, he formed a political alliance with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and won the admiring friendship of men as various as Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Thomas Mann, and George Bernard Shaw. As an old man, he was corresponding with Carl Jung and Albert Camus, and in 1967 President Lyndon Johnson honored him at a special White House ceremony.
 
Sinclair was the most conservative of revolutionaries. The author of some ninety books and innumerable articles and essays, he had no patience with stream-of-consciousness narratives or even free verse. “He liked a writer to have something to say, and to say it with clarity and precision,” Sinclair said of his alter ego Lanny Budd, just as “he disliked loud noises and confusion, and obscurity cultivated as a form of exclusiveness.” He was also a straitlaced puritan concerning sex—this, despite at least one extramarital fling and an intemperate habit when young of linking marriage with prostitution and slavery. In a period when heavy drinking was widely seen to be a social necessity, if not a virtue, he despised alcohol, which had killed his father. Indeed, he disdained any form of indulgence: he even worried about his fondness for cakes and pies, fearing that he had it in him to become a “food drunkard.”
 
These attributes, coupled with Sinclair’s customary insistence that he knew best what was right for everyone else, encouraged extreme views among both his admirers and his detractors. To one disciple he was a “dearly beloved saint”; to another, “one who has been marked by the Gods as one who shall blaze the trail.” And to a third, a woman suffering from multiple sclerosis, he was someone who “understands”: “PLEASE PLEASE, Mr. Sinclair, write to me,” she begged. “That is all I ask.” His quick response, she replied gratefully, was “a purest ray serene. You have been sweet and kind to write to me.”
 
But the saint could also be self-righteous and petulant, even absurd. His friend and onetime protégé Sinclair Lewis—the general public still confuses the author of Babbitt and Main Street with Upton Sinclair—howled when Sinclair chided him in print for making too much money: “My God, Upton, go and pray for forgiveness, honesty, and humility!” H. L. Mencken traded letters and barbs for many years with Sinclair and teased him for his “credulity complex,” for not seeing that the “common people are damned to be diddled forever.” Sinclair’s own socialist publisher threw up his hands in dismay over his belief in ESP and ghosts, calling him an “egregious sucker,” a “zanie,” and “the Daniel Boone of Spookology.” And these were his friends. His enemies compared him to Peter the Hermit and to Savonarola, the fanatical Florentine monk who got himself burned at the stake.
 
Sinclair himself used characters from history, religion, and literature as favored points of reference and departure. His typical plot sent a naive seeker in search of truth: Voltaire’s Candide was one of his models, as was Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress, a traveler in what John Bunyan called the wilderness of the world. Another Sinclair favorite was Siddhartha, the Indian prince who gave up “his land and his treasures, and went out to wander with a beggar’s bowl, in the hope of finding some truth about life that was not known at court.”
 
Above all, there was Don Quixote, whose adventures prompted Sinclair to ask the question that guided him throughout his life: “What shall be the relation of the idealist, the dreamer of good and beautiful things, to the world of ugliness and greed in which he finds himself?” If he tries to apply his vision of the good, “the world will treat him so badly that before he gets through he may be really crazy.”
 
As the breadth and depth of these allusions suggest, Sinclair was a far more sophisticated man of letters than most of his critics were willing to acknowledge. At the same time, it was his calculatedly naive manner that had let him find so many readers among workers, shopkeepers, and the poor; it was in this way that he became, as this biography suggests, a “radical innocent.” The manner of the innocent seeker after knowledge had finally become the man—and yet, as his closing anecdote for the audience in Indiana revealed, the child had been father to the man all along.
 
When he was a very small child, Sinclair said, his family’s fortunes fluctuated wildly. Sometimes he was sent to stay with his mother’s wealthy relatives in Baltimore, though generally he lived with her and his pathetic father in New York tenements and boardinghouses. One day he asked his mother to explain the reasons for such obvious and unnecessary pain in a land of plenty, saying “Why, Mama?”
 
He had gone on to ask that same question for the next eighty years, he said. Even though he had done his best, he had to admit failure: “I haven’t found the answer yet.” But he was still looking, he told his rapt listeners, still asking “Why, Mama?” He hoped they would continue to ask that question, too.