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Upton Sinclair Upton Sinclair
Lauren Coodley
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“For America,” by Jackson Browne
© Swallow Turn Music.
Used with permission.
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United
States of America
Publication of this volume was assisted
by a grant from the Friends of the
University of Nebraska Press.
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Coodley, Lauren.
Upton Sinclair: California socialist,
celebrity intellectual / Lauren Coodley.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references
and index.
---- (cloth: alk. paper)
. Sinclair, Upton, –. . Social
reformers—California—Biography.
. Novelists, American—th century—
Biography. . Social change—United
States—History—th century.
. Investigative reporting—United
States—Biography. I. Title.
.
'.—dc [B]
Set in Sabon Next by Laura Wellington.
Designed by Nathan Putens.
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The kid I was when I first le home
Was looking for his freedom and a life of his own
But the freedom that he found wasn’t quite as sweet
When the truth was known
I have prayed for America
I was made for America
I can’t let go till she comes around
Until the land of the free
Is awake and can see
And until her conscience has been found
, “For America”
Buy the Book
Contents
List of Illustrations .................................... ix
Preface ................................................ xi
Acknowledgments .....................................xv
. Southern Gentlemen Drank, – ..................
. Making Real Men of Our Boys, – ..............
. Good Health and How We Won It, – ...........
. Singing Jailbirds, – ............................
. How I Ran for Governor, – ...................
. World’s End, – ...............................
. A Lifetime in Letters, – .......................
Aerword: A World to Win, – ................
Appendix A: Upton Sinclair’s Women Friends ........
Appendix B: Recommended Reading .................
Notes .................................................
Index ................................................
Buy the Book
Illustrations
. Upton Sinclair at eight years old in ................
. Upton Sinclair’s Manhattan ............................
. Cover of Army and Navy Weekly, June .............
. Upton Sinclair with his son, David, ...............
. Picketing at the Rockefeller oce in New York, ....
. Poster for the film The Jungle, ......................
. Sinclair playing tennis .................................
. Kate Crane Gartz ......................................
. Sinclairs’ Pasadena house ..............................
. Upton Sinclair in Hollywood, .....................
. Singing Jailbirds cast and stage set .......................
. Poster from India for Singing Jailbirds ..................
. Sinclair playing violin out of doors ...................
. Program for premiere of The Wet Parade ...............
. Charlie Chaplin ......................................
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. Eisenstein at film shoot in Mexico, ...............
. Eisenstein’s crew filming ¡Qué viva México!, ......
. I, Governor of California pamphlet .....................
. Campaign song .................................
. “Sincliar” dollar ......................................
. Immediate brochure ............................
. Sinclair with his dog, Duchess ........................
. Arrival of copies of The Flivver King, ..............
. Dragon’s Teeth book cover .............................
. Monrovia house ......................................
. Ronald Gottesman and Upton Sinclair, ..........
. Walt Disney and Upton Sinclair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. The Upton Sinclair Quarterly ...........................
Buy the Book
xi
Preface
Upton Sinclair both disrupted and documented his era. The impact
of his most famous work, The Jungle, would merit him a place in
American history had he never written another book. Yet he wrote
nearly eighty more, publishing most of them himself. What Sinclair
did was both simple and profound: he committed his life to help-
ing people of his era understand how society was run, by whom
and for whom. His aim was nothing less than to “bury capitalism
under a barrage of facts,” as Howard Zinn describes it.¹
Upton Sinclair introduced himself to American readers in
with the publication of The Jungle, his exposé of the meatpack-
ing industry. He was only twenty-five years old. For the next six
decades, he would remain an unconventional, oen controversial,
and always innovative character in American life. He was also a
filmmaker, a labor activist, a women’s rights advocate, and a health
pioneer on the grandest scale
—
a lifetime surprisingly relevant for
twenty-first-century Americans.
A hundred years ago, investigative journalism was just being
conceived, and Sinclair’s undercover reporting on the conditions
in a meatpacking plant may have been its birthing moment. Film-
making was beginning to change the way stories were told and
how people gained access to information. His friends were experi-
menting with sexual freedom and birth control, but the shadow of
Buy the Book
Preface
xii
alcoholism was beginning to take its toll in the radical community,
and Sinclair would record his own assessment of the dangers of
alcohol in his novel
—
and later film
—
The Wet Parade.
Sinclair critiqued institutions ranging from organized religion
to journalism to education. These analyses remain surprisingly
relevant. The problems with education and with media concentra-
tion, which Sinclair identified so presciently in , have become
impossible to ignore.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, organized labor was
struggling with the question of how to cope with the emergent
hegemony of large-scale corporate capitalism. Sinclair responded by
organizing a daily picket of Rockefeller headquarters in New York
City to show support for embattled coal miners in Colorado. That
same year he wrote a science fiction novel, The Millennium, which
predicted what life would be like in with startling accuracy.
His activism was as attuned to his time
—
and as contemporary
—
as
the Occupy Wall Street movement is today. Sinclair demonstrated
not only how a writer attempts to change history through literature
but also lends his or her personality to the political struggles of
the times. A conscious creator of popular history, Sinclair himself
starred in one of the first prolabor films, The Jungle, in . He
wrote Boston to document the Sacco-Vanzetti trial; Oil! exposed
the depredations of the oil industry in California; Singing Jailbirds
in recorded the imprisonment of Wobblies in Los Angeles.
In his sixties, Sinclair wrote a series of antifascist spy novels,
the World’s End series. The series was, as Dieter Herms has noted,
“antifascist propaganda entertainingly packaged in the wrappers
of popular literature.”² The books garnered him best-seller status
again, and in he became the oldest author to receive a Pulit-
zer Prize. This biography incorporates the many lives changed by
Upton Sinclair
—
intellectuals, union leaders, and common citizens,
who were impacted by not only the World’s End series but by his
other novels, his plays, and by his Campaign for governor
of California.
Buy the Book
Preface
xiii
For Sinclair, his books were significant only to the degree that
they exerted social influence, as the concluding pages of his autobi-
ography reveal. He asks himself, “Just what do you think you have
accomplished in your long lifetime?” and then provides ten answers.³
All involve social change in which his books were instrumental.
Nowhere in this list of accomplishments is there a judgment that
any of his novels represent an exclusively literary achievement.
Yet, oddly enough, it has been le to literary critics to assess his
reputation.
Part of Sinclair’s political analysis was that a healthy and sober
personal life would make him a more eective agent of change
—
an
early understanding of what would become a radical injunction that
the personal is political. Sinclair, writes critic William Bloodworth,
made “an unusually vigorous attempt to combine questions of food
with political propaganda.” As the adult child of an alcoholic, Sin-
clair was almost alone among his radical colleagues in abstaining
from alcohol for political reasons, and his embrace of temperance is
one of the many aspects by which contemporary historians might
reevaluate him. Temperance crusader Frances Willard’s argument
that the welfare of women and children suered from the eects of
male alcoholism animated Sinclair’s crusade. He was not afraid of
identifying with what many at the time considered a women’s issue.
His mother’s temperance beliefs and his father’s alcoholism made
him a lifelong crusader both for Prohibition and for temperance.
Indeed, Upton Sinclair was a man who challenged conventional
masculinity. In that sense, he was ahead of his own time and vitally
relevant to ours. He was a radical much influenced by women.
His interest in communal living and communal childcare is quite
unusual. His reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s theories on
domestic labor and public life inspired his founding of the uto-
pian colony Helicon Hall in , created to allow both men and
women full lives as artists and activists. Yet until now, the available
Sinclair criticism has omitted discussion of Sinclair’s feminism.
This book includes, for the first time, some of the extraordinary
Buy the Book
Preface
xiv
correspondence that Upton Sinclair maintained with many of the
leading women activists of the twentieth century. Sinclair exempli-
fies an alternative identity for male radicals in the first half of the
twentieth century; the connections between Sinclair’s personal and
political decisions can help us make sense of his story. This work
will add to the scholarship produced by the two fine biographies
published in ; I will be citing important insights from Anthony
Arthur and Kevin Mattson. All chapter titles in my book are based
on works written by Upton Sinclair.
Upton Sinclair’s activism spanned half a century, and he wrote
book aer book in an eort to draw others to his causes. As his
son, David, recalled, “My father used to say, I don’t know if anyone
will care to examine my heart aer I die. But if they do, they will
find two words there: social justice.” Because Sinclair was so pas-
sionately engaged in the world around him, his story is inextricably
linked to the major struggles that gave his life meaning. It is my
hope that this work will oer a fresh understanding of the life and
times of Upton Sinclair.
Buy the Book
xv
Acknowledgments
Over the past fieen years, I became acquainted with a fascinating
group of Sinclair scholars, who generously shared their work with
me. I am profoundly grateful to Ron Gottesman, John Ahouse, and
to Robert Hahn for their enthusiasm, their kindness, and their
tremendous body of knowledge.
Along the way to this biography, I was able to edit a collection
of Sinclair’s writings in and about California. I thank Malcolm
Margolin for bringing Land of Orange Groves and Jails to fruition,
and the Mesa Writers Refuge for oering me the opportunity to
begin my book there. I thank the Lilly Library for the Everett Helm
Fellowship, which allowed me to spend time in the archives, and
library sta Cherry Williams and Zach Downey for their gener-
ous assistance in this project. For their constant encouragement,
I thank Harvey Schwartz, Lisa Rubens, Cita Cook, Nils McCune,
Gregg Coodley, Anita Catlin, Stephanie Grohs, and Cathy Mathews.
My deepest appreciation to Karen Brown, Paula Amen Judah,
Caitlin Vega, and Steve Hiatt, who each provided brilliant editorial
insights. Lauren Ellsworth aided mightily as a research assistant.
She, and later Hillary Schwartz, handled all technical aspects of
production with grace and humor. I oer a most fervent thanks
to Matt Bokovoy and the University of Nebraska Press for their
interest in my work. To all of you who kept faith with me in the
Buy the Book
Acknowledgments
xvi
Sinclair project over these many years: here it is. This book is dedi-
cated to the two Sinclair biographers, Dieter Herms and Sachiko
Nakada, whose work remains to be translated into English, and
to the “common reader” whose devotion paved the way for the
Sinclair scholarship of today, Edward Allatt.
Danke
Arigatō
Thank you
Buy the Book
Southern Gentleman Drank
[1878–1892]
Whiskey in its multiple forms
—
mint juleps, toddies, hot Scotches,
eggnogs, punch
—
was the most conspicuous single fact in my boy-
hood. I saw it and smelled it and heard it everywhere I turned, but
I never tasted it.
,
In twenty-year-old Frederick Douglass quietly slipped away
from the shipyards of Baltimore toward a life of freedom.¹ His
autobiographical account of his youth as a slave in Maryland elec-
trified the abolitionist movement of the Northern states. Douglass
developed an original and devastating style as an orator, and his
fervent calls for racial justice challenged and molded the nation’s
conscience. In the century to follow, another famous son of this
once slave-owning city, Upton Sinclair
—
with his fierce commit-
ment to truth telling
—
would set out to educate and provoke the
American people, and later, his international readers, to defend
these ideals of equality. Baltimore’s rich history, poised between
North and south throughout the tumultuous period of the Civil
War and its aermath, inspired the passions of both Douglass and
Sinclair to seek justice across lines of gender, class, and race.
Maryland had been a slave state, but its proximity to the Dis-
trict of Columbia prevented it from ever joining the Confederacy,
Buy the Book
Southern Gentlemen Drank
despite substantial support for the South among its white citizens.
In the presidential election of , Abraham Lincoln received just
over one thousand votes, out of thirty thousand cast. Southern
Rights Democrats controlled the state legislature, and only the
refusal of Maryland’s pro-Union governor Thomas Hicks to call
the legislature into session prevented them from forming an alli-
ance with the Confederacy. Baltimore’s mayor barely supported
the Union, and its police chief was a Confederate sympathizer.
Countless buildings and homes boldly flew the Confederate flag,
when the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment
—
the first fully equipped
unit to respond to Lincoln’s call for troops
—
entered Baltimore on
its way to Washington on April , .
There was no rail line through Baltimore, so the troops had
to cross the city on foot to board a train for the capital. A mob
surrounded the soldiers and attacked the rear companies of the
regiment with bricks, paving stones, and pistols. A few soldiers
opened fire. Four soldiers and twelve citizens of Baltimore died in
the skirmish, the first combat deaths of more than seven hundred
thousand during the next four years.
Within four weeks of the clash, President Lincoln had established
martial law in Maryland, suspended habeas corpus, and sent troops
to occupy the city, ending any chance that the state would join the
Confederacy. Yet support for the Confederacy remained high among
the white population. In the Savannah Republican reported
that high-society ladies of Baltimore appeared daily in the streets
in secession colors of red and white. Despite Maryland’s uncertain
support for the Union, Baltimore seemed poised to become an
important economic center as the Civil War wound to a close.
In September Frederick Douglass made a return to Baltimore,
despite warnings that he could be assassinated. There he delivered
the inaugural speech of the Douglass Institute, which would go
on to become the political heart of the city’s African American
community for the next twenty-five years. In his speech Douglass
evoked a better America, telling his audience that “the establishment
Buy the Book
1878–1892
of an institute bearing my name by the colored people in the city
of my boyhood, so soon aer the act of emancipation in the state,
looms before me as a first grand indication of progress.”²
Reconstruction brought industrial power and its consequences to
Maryland. Baltimore became known as the New York of the South,
a destination for both European immigrants and freed slaves. Chesa-
peake Bay tobacco was made into cigars and exported to Europe by
H. L. Mencken’s grandfather and other German immigrants. The
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, one of the country’s first railroads,
linked the city with western Maryland and the states beyond. City
mills, powered by rivers and streams known as “falls,” produced
flour and meal, while clothing, cotton goods, leather, machinery,
footwear, canned oysters, pork, beef, lumber, furniture, and liquors
flowed from its factories.
Rural families driven out by the rising power of banks and rail-
roads were drawn to Baltimore’s diverse economy. Its neighborhoods
were compact, with red brick rows lining an irregular street pattern.
Poor families crowded into cellars and basements, where water
was oen contaminated and air circulation was poor. As capitalist
development changed the landscape, Baltimore’s contradictory
growth became plain. It had the “attractive dirt of a fishing town,
the nightmare horizons of a great industrial town,” as Christina
Stead put it.³ Raw sewage ran through hot streets, and infectious
diseases killed increasing numbers of poor children in Baltimore.
Within a decade, the contradictions of Reconstruction had
brought class conflict to a head. The economic crash of began
what was known at the time as the “Great Depression.” Unemploy-
ment skyrocketed as construction came to a standstill across the
nation. In railroad workers called a strike in a dozen cities,
including at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The strike began
with wage cuts on the railroads, where brakemen were making .
for a twelve-hour day, and where loss of hands, feet, and fingers
was routine.
In Baltimore, thousands of strike sympathizers surrounded the
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Southern Gentlemen Drank
armory of the National Guard. The crowd hurled rocks, and the
soldiers came out, firing. At one point fieen thousand people
surrounded the depot, setting fire to three passenger cars and a
locomotive. President Hayes sent federal troops to smash the strike.
When the strikes were over, a hundred people had died, a thousand
people were in jail, and one hundred thousand workers experienced
their first labor action.
On September , , exactly forty years aer Frederick Douglass
escaped from Baltimore, a Southern railroad baron’s daughter,
Priscilla Harden Sinclair, gave birth in the row house where she
lived with her husband at North Charles Street. The child, a
boy, was named for his father, Upton Sinclair, a whiskey wholesaler.
Within twenty-five years, this young man would change the course
of American history.
The Sinclair family of Virginia had served in the navy since the
country began. Great-grandfather Arthur Sinclair served as a mid-
shipman on the U.S. frigate Constellation in . He commanded
the U.S. frigate Argus during the War of , fought not only to
expel the British but also to expand America’s borders into Florida,
Canada, and Indian territories. Upton Sinclair’s grandfather, Arthur
Sinclair II, was also a career ocer in the navy and commanded
one of the vessels in Admiral Perry’s fleet that opened up Japan.
Grandfather Sinclair had been a Confederate blockade runner,
one of the most romanticized figures of the war, who would slip
past fleets of heavily armed Union ships at night to bring food
and armaments to Southern cities. It was a risky business, and a
London newspaper reported his death aer the Leila sailed from
London in with seven hundred tons of coal and iron. In a
raging storm, the boat apparently sank. Nearly five months later,
a fisherman found Commander Sinclair’s body ten miles out to
sea wrapped in his nets. The Fleetwood Chronicle reported that “his
skeletal remains were still clothed, even to his cravat held in place
by a gold and agate pin. His overcoat was still buttoned up and he
Buy the Book
1878–1892
had retained his watch in his breast pocket.” The pocket watch
was stopped at :
—
approximately the time the Leila sank, which
led to the identification of the body.
Upton Sinclair’s father was born in the s in Norfolk, Virginia,
and his parents had named him for the Episcopal minister Upton
Beall. The once prominent Sinclair family emerged destitute from
the Civil War, and Sinclair’s father abandoned the family’s naval
tradition in favor of a business career. The liquor trade thrived in
the ruined South, so Upton Beall Sinclair entered the wholesale
liquor business, and drinking became a key element of the Sinclair
family legacy. Upton Beall Sinclair’s sales trips took him to Balti-
more, a city where newly impoverished Southerners oen traveled,
looking for a new start in life.
Here Upton Beall Sinclair met and courted Priscilla Harden,
who was born into privilege as the daughter of John S. Harden,
the secretary and treasurer of the Western Maryland Railroad. The
Harden family emerged from the Civil War with its fortune intact,
in stark contrast to the Sinclairs. Upton Beall Sinclair married
Priscilla Harden shortly before the birth of their son.
Floyd Dell, an early biographer, wrote that Upton Beall Sinclair
“worshipped his only son.” Although he was unable to provide for
his family, “he could at least teach his son to be a kind and chivalrous
Southern gentleman.”¹ Upton Sinclair oen described his father in
fascinated detail, a reminder that an absent or unavailable parent is
oen the more intriguing one to a child. His father was proud of
his clothing and interested in food. “What was the size and flavor
of Blue Point oysters as compared to Lynnhaven Bays? Why was
it impossible to obtain properly cooked food north of Baltimore?
Would the straw hats of next season have high or low brims?”¹¹
Sinclair remembered these kinds of preoccupations.
Well-dressed or not, Sinclair recalled, “everywhere he went he had
to have a drink before the deal was made and then they celebrated
by another drink aer the deal was made.”¹² His father’s drinking
was responsible for the dismal living conditions of the family: “I
Buy the Book
Southern Gentlemen Drank
remember boarding-house and lodging-house rooms. We never
had but one room at a time, and I slept on a sofa or crossways at
the foot of my parent’s bed.”¹³
Wendy Gamber’s research on American boardinghouses reveals
that aer the Civil War, “home” represented far more than merely
a household. It was characterized as a refuge from the world, a site
where relations between the sexes were regulated, and a location
of moral guidance. Gamber notes that, in contrast, “in boarding-
houses women washed, cleaned, and cooked for money, services
that elsewhere they presumably provided out of love.”¹ Thus the
boardinghouse, a place where strangers of both sexes might meet,
represented the very antithesis of a respectable home.
Rather than engaging in naval battles, as paternal family tradition
expected, Upton Sinclair would launch a dierent kind of battle
against the inequities of capitalism. As a child, the first injustices
he noticed were in the boardinghouse. Wendy Gamber writes that
boardinghouse food
—
“immortalized in innumerable stories, jokes,
and even songs
—
inspired a colorful folklore and equally color-
ful vocabulary: ‘hirsute butter,’ ‘damaged coee,’ ‘ancient bread,’
‘azure milk,’ ‘antediluvian pies.’”¹ Fortunately for Priscilla Harden
Sinclair, she could find solace in the temperance movement and
the company of other wives and daughters of alcoholics, women
who could neither vote nor earn a living in America at the turn
of the century.
Scholars who are rethinking the caricature of temperance advo-
cates acknowledge how these women
—
and men
—
transformed
personal tragedies into a vibrant political movement.¹ Aer the
Civil War, temperance
—
not surage
—
became the most powerful
women’s social movement, rising from the desperation to protect
family members from the poverty and frequent abuse that was
perceived to be caused by alcohol. Lack of clean water meant that
weak beer was a healthy alternative for much of the population.
Men bonded over beer; masculinity was constructed through a
status ritual based on European customs of hospitality.¹ Beyond
Buy the Book
1878–1892
that, since the sixteenth century, men had engaged in a wave of
overindulgence in distilled spirits.
Just prior to her marriage, Priscilla would have heard of the
Temperance Crusade of –. The Crusaders marched from one
saloon and bar to the other; they prayed, sang, argued, and begged
liquor dealers to abandon their business. Suragists such as Miriam
M. Cole noted with approval the Crusaders’ unconventionality: “A
woman knocking out the head of a whiskey barrel with an axe, to
the tune of Old Hundred, is not the ideal woman sitting on the sofa,
dining on strawberries and cream.”¹ The Crusade, which brought
thousands of new women to activism, was the first large-scale tem-
perance movement created specifically by and for women.¹
The Crusade’s successor organization, the Women’s Christian
Temperance Union (), solidified women’s leadership in the
temperance movement. president Frances Willard envisioned
temperance as a movement that would treat women’s personal
problems seriously and develop a public and political solution for
them. By enlisting thousands of women into temperance activity,
Willard would also educate them about the urgency of prison
reform, child labor laws, and woman surage.² We know that
Priscilla Harden Sinclair marched for temperance, and that she
brought her young son to march alongside her. Mrs. Sinclair rep-
resented the heart of the temperance army: white, Protestant, born
into a family of industrialists.²¹ Mrs. Sinclair may have spoken to
her son about the many concerns of the , causes he would
come to champion and fight for once grown. Sinclair said, “I gave
my word of honor to my mother that I would never touch a drop
of liquor in my life.”²² Like other Southern women who had seen
the ravages of alcohol among their men, Priscilla had brought up
her son to hate liquor. She also abstained from tea and coee.
Sinclair recounts a typical scene in his home when “Father would
hide the money when he came in late, and then in the morn-
ing he would forget where he had hidden it, and there would be
searching under mattresses and carpets, and inside the lining of
Buy the Book
Southern Gentlemen Drank
his clothing.”²³ Wendy Gamber explains that “visiting” other rela-
tives was a necessary economic strategy for boarders who were
unable to pay rent on a regular basis, as well as “a necessity for
keeping up appearances.”² When the Sinclairs had no money to
pay rent, mother and son sought refuge in the home of her father.
Unlike other families where the daughter marries down and the
family quietly provides a sinecure for her husband, Priscilla’s fam-
ily must have actively disapproved the marriage and doubted her
ability to retain any funds they might give her; indeed, she was a
constant victim of the economic chaos created by her husband’s
alcoholism.
Grandfather Harden, who by the s had become president
of the Western Maryland Railroad, was thus a source of stability
in their lives. As a deacon of the Methodist Church, he did not
drink or serve alcohol. Harden and his wife, Emma, lived at
Maryland Avenue in a four-story brick house with white marble
steps rising to the front door. A one-horse streetcar would roll by
the front door every morning, taking Grandfather to his oce and
bringing him home for lunch each day. Upton was given a set of
blocks with pictures and letters on them: “I taught myself to read,
little by little, to pick out words from those blocks.” He adds, “Aer
that I didn’t want to do anything but read.”² He especially loved
Gulliver’s Travels and Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates.
Christina Hardyment has studied childrearing culture in English
and American middle-class homes during this period. Parents like
Priscilla Sinclair embraced fairy tales for their children, images
believed to be rooted in ancient European culture. Hardyment
observed that “walks in all weathers were the rule, and the windows
of the nursery were to be kept open as much as possible.”² Upton
was shaped by these new ideas about child rearing. Fairy tales, with
their moral clarity, would set the tone for many of his novels, and
his love of outdoor life was undoubtedly made possible by the
flinging open of the nursery windows
—
although his nursery was
also his parents’ bedroom.
Buy the Book
1878–1892
The boy would oen choose a book from his grandfather’s library
and set out for Druid Hill Park to read under the trees. The park,
built in , held a zoo, botanical gardens, and a lake for boating.
Druid Hill Park’s conservatory, where Upton could enjoy exotic
plants, was designed by George Frederick, architect of Baltimore
City Hall. Henry Adams’s memoir describes Baltimore as the child
Upton Sinclair may have experienced it: “The brooding heat of the
profligate vegetation; the cool charm of the running water; the
terrific splendor of the June thunder-gust in the deep and solitary
woods, were all sensual, animal, elemental.”²
The freedom to be alone in nature was one of the salvations of
Sinclair’s childhood. Books were clearly the other: “While argu-
ments between my father and my mother were going on, I was
with Gulliver in Lilliput, or on my way to the Celestial City with
Christian, or in the shop with the little tailor who killed ‘seven at
one blow.’”² Writing followed reading, and Upton Sinclair com-
posed his first story at age five, called “The Story of a Pin.” “This pin
fell into the garbage, and I remember I caused great glee because
I spelled it ‘gobbage.’ The garbage was fed to a pig and the pig was
made into sausage, and the pin appeared in the sausage.” Decades
later, his interviewer, Ron Gottesman, suggested to him, “Kind
of anticipating The Jungle in that first story?” Surprised, Sinclair
answered that he “hadn’t thought of that aspect of it.”²
Back at his grandfather’s house on Maryland Avenue, Upton
remembered watching the terrapins lumber into the backyard,
where a servant would spear them through the heads with a fork
and decapitate them with a butcher knife.³ He described his grand-
father “carving unending quantities of chickens, ducks, turkeys,
and hams,” but could not recall a single word he spoke.³¹ He did
remember the warmth of his Irish grandmother who “made delight-
ful ginger cookies, played on the piano, and sang little tunes to
which I danced.”³²
But the boy absorbed more than the rich food and the music.
One night when he was three years old, his mother’s brother, Uncle
Buy the Book
1878–1892
Harry, was drinking and his grandfather was trying to keep him
from going out. They had a violent argument. Sinclair comments:
“Uncle Harry had been an athlete, handsome, gay, with a hardy
laugh. Then at the age of forty, Uncle Harry bought himself a pistol,
sat on a bench in Central Park, and put a bullet through his head.”³³
Thus his mother suered the alcoholism not only of her husband,
but of her brother as well. Although Sinclair’s lifelong dedication
to temperance has puzzled and amused his biographers, it makes
perfect sense in light of his formative childhood experiences with
alcoholism and temperance.
Upton Sinclair grew up as an only child, and there would be
no other children in the Sinclair family. Abstinence was the com-
mon method used by women of Priscilla Sinclair’s class to prevent
pregnancy and avoid childbirth, which were oen life-threatening.
In the nineteenth century, as in all previous centuries, many hus-
bands would outlive two, three, or four wives when women died
in childbirth. Certainly, the Sinclairs were also constrained in their
intimate life by the presence of a child in the bedroom.
The theories of Darwin, as articulated in the women’s magazines
she read, may have influenced Priscilla to have only one child.³ In
the work of Sir Frances Galton, a Social Darwinist, Mrs. Sinclair
would have read about the importance of preventing “inferior
specimens of humanity from transmitting their vices or diseases,
their intellectual or physical weaknesses.”³ Knowing the propensity
for alcoholism on both sides of the family, she surely had reason
to fear this genetic inheritance.
Pricilla Sinclair found comfort in her faith; she took Upton
with her to church every Sunday, grooming her precocious child
to become a bishop. The boy’s father dreamed a dierent future
for his son. Upton Beall Sinclair thought that his son resembled
his own father, Arthur Sinclair II, and hoped the boy would grow
up to pursue a successful naval career. Floyd Dell imagined him
as “a slight, straight, grizzled captain, something of a martinet,
unquestionably brave, not very popular, a little aloof, doing his
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Southern Gentlemen Drank
duty, carrying on the family traditions.”³ While trying to earn
enough money for a room apart from that of his parents, Sinclair
would incorporate his father’s fascination with the navy into his
first published stories.
In the summers, Upton and his mother lodged in various dilapi-
dated old hot springs in the South; he grew up surrounded by
what Kevin Mattson aptly describes as “the bizarre and fantastic
side of southern culture.”³ He recalled a place called Jett’s, which
they traveled to in a bumpy stagecoach: “The members of that
household were pale ghosts, and we discovered that they were
users of drugs. There was an idiot boy who worked in the yard,
and gobbled his food out of a tin plate, like a dog.”³ Later he told
Floyd Dell that he could write a Dickensian novel about it “if I
thought the old South was worth muckraking.”³ His only novel
about the South would be a Civil War novel, Manassas, set just
before his birth.
At times, rather than going to Grandfather Harden’s, Upton and
his mother sheltered at her sister’s opulent home. Pricilla Harden’s
sister, Maria, married John Randolph Bland, one of the richest men
in Baltimore, who became the president of the powerful United
States Fidelity and Guarantee Company. The family business was
housed in a seven-story building occupying a quarter of a city
block in Baltimore.
During his childhood and adolescence, Upton returned again
and again to this home on Howard Street. There was a bay window
in one of the parlors, with a sofa in front of it. He would climb
into the window, hide behind the sofa, and read picture books.
He also looked at the Christian Herald, with its pictures of young
men wasted by addiction. There in Uncle Bland’s brick house, the
child watched adults at countless dances and parties. Biographer
Anthony Arthur suggests that the Bland world was like the one
Edith Wharton describes in The House of Mirth, published in , a
year before The Jungle. Sinclair recalled, “I breathed that atmosphere
of pride and scorn, of values based on material possessions. . . . I
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1878–1892
do not know why I came to hate it, but I know I did hate it from
my earliest days.”
Arthur notes that Sinclair’s moral vision was very similar to that
of Wharton, but that “unlike her he would conclude that societal
flaws were economic in origin, and therefore curable.”¹ Thorstein
Veblen wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class (published in )
based on his experiences in Baltimore. While in graduate school
at John Hopkins University, Veblen had boarded with a family of
impoverished aristocrats who labored to maintain the style of their
antebellum past. “Their servants came cheap, but wine and show
did not. That host family spent far more on style at table than they
ever collected in board money.”²
Staying with his cousins oered Upton Sinclair opportunities to
explore late nineteenth-century urban life. When both were older,
Sinclair wrote to his cousin Howard Bland, reminiscing about
their childhood journeys to dime museums. For many children
who did not attend school, the dime museums, established by P. T.
Barnum, were an important source of information about the social
issues of the second half of the nineteenth century.³ These muse-
ums taught about temperance and evolution, using lively exhibits
such as Barnum’s “half-man-half-monkey” displays. Walking out of
the dime museum, his head whirling with these images, the child
Upton Sinclair would also have observed European immigrants,
like those he would profile in The Jungle, men, women, and children
who worked in the new Baltimore factories turning out canned
tomatoes, pianos, straw hats, and umbrellas.
When Upton was ten, the Sinclairs decided to move to New York
City, where his father would try to sell hats instead of whiskey. They
gave their son the option of staying behind with his wealthy rela-
tives. Loyal to his parents, Upton went with them to New York, a
decision that would change the course of his life. Had his family
stayed in Baltimore, Sinclair would never have been introduced to
the publishers, the periodicals, or the disruption of the fixed social
hierarchy of the South.
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Southern Gentlemen Drank
Gotham’s Expanding Horizons
What a time to be in New York City! In the Statue of Liberty
was unveiled. In electric streetcars began to carry passengers
across the city. By New York’s mass transit system, with both
elevated and subterranean railroads, boasted a greater total mileage
than London’s. In New York hosted its first tickertape parade,
witnessed by new arrival Upton Sinclair. In Ellis Island was
constructed as the entry point for hundreds of thousands of Euro-
pean immigrants each year. In , when Sinclair was seventeen,
New York public libraries opened for the first time, allowing him
to revel in books not found at home.
But New York’s dynamism had a price. By the time the family
arrived, ten thousand abandoned or orphaned children lived on
the streets of New York. Death from starvation or preventable dis-
eases was routine
—
penicillin, antibiotics, and sulfa had not been
discovered. Many of these children begged. Others, singly or in
gangs, stole to stay alive. During the s, the most notorious gang
in New York City was the Five Points Gang, named for its home
turf in the Five Points (Bowery) section of Lower Manhattan, close
to where the Sinclairs lived. Jack Finney describes the streets,
full of “carriages of black, maroon, green, brown, some shabby,
some elegant and glinting with glass and polish,” which “trotted,
lumbered, or rattled over the stones.” Delivery wagons, loaded
with barrels, crates, and sacks, were pulled by teams of enormous
steam-breathing dray horses.
The Sinclair family moved frequently, usually living in board-
ing houses, on West Sixty-Fih, West Ninety-Sixth, and West th
Streets, among others. As New York City’s population expanded,
more and more establishments oered room and board to rural
migrants, European newcomers, and assorted people who could not
or would not live in “homes.” Wendy Gamber’s survey of newspaper
advertisements reveal that “there was indeed a boardinghouse for
everyone: Swedenborgians, tailors, amateur musicians, ‘respectable
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W. TH ST
W. ND ST
W. TH ST
RD ST
LEXINGTON AVE
TH ST
E. TH ST
W. TH ST
TH AVE
IRVING PL
AVE A
AVE B
ND AVE
Central Park:
Sinclair ice skated
in the winters and
played tennis in
the summers
Location of a
boarding house
where the Sinclair
family lived.
E. 23rd St:
PS 40 which Sinclair
attended from age 10–13
Lexington Ave and 23rd St:
City College of New York where
Sinclair began classes at age 14
6th Ave & 20th St:
Church of the Holy
Communion where
Sinclair was confirmed
as an Episcopalian and
taught Sunday School.
Ave A & Ave B:
Territory of the Five Point Gang
N
. Upton Sinclair’s Manhattan. Courtesy of Molly Roy.
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Southern Gentlemen Drank
colored people,’ Southerners, teetotalers, and disciples of the food
reformer Sylvester Graham.” Roughly between a third and a half
of nineteenth-century urban residents either took in boarders or
were boarders themselves.
The Sinclair family lived longest at the Hotel Weisiger on West
Nineteenth Street, a rundown establishment where Colonel Weisiger
hosted a rag-tag assortment of destitute Confederate sympathiz-
ers. Sinclair remembered how he and other boys killed flies on
the bald heads of the men, coaxed tea cake from the kitchen, and
pulled the pigtails of the little girls playing dolls in the parlor. He
comments wryly, “One of these little girls, with whom I quarreled
most of the time, was destined to grow up and become my first
wife; and our married life resembled our childhood.” In Love’s
Pilgrimage, Sinclair’s autobiographical novel, he describes a sum-
mer that their two families spent together in the country, where
he tried to impress little Meta by killing squirrels and chipmunks
with a slingshot. Next he began raising young robins and crows,
in order to keep her busy feeding them the fish that he caught.
Sinclair remembered the Weisiger house as a treasure trove of
“comedies and tragedies, jealousies and greeds, and spites.” Some
evenings, residents played card games like Patience, or they read
aloud from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. The publication pro-
vided illustrations
—
first using woodcuts and daguerreotypes, then
more advanced forms of photography
—
of conflicts ranging from
John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry through the Spanish-American
War. Its cover featured pictures of manly soldiers and epic battles.
In the evenings, someone played the organ and the residents sang
songs like “Maryland, My Maryland!” or “The Southrons’ Chaunt of
Defiance.” These former Confederate ocers continued to celebrate
the military pageantry and heroism of the Civil War, teaching the
children that theirs had been a sacred cause. And always, the old
men drank.
In New York, Sinclair was oen sent to hunt down his father in
saloons. In Love’s Pilgrimage, he paints the scene: “It was the Highway
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1878–1892
of Lost Men . . . their faces . . . gaunt with misery, or bloated with
disease. . . . The boy sprang forward with a cry: ‘Father!’ And a man
. . . fell upon his shoulder, sobbing, ‘My son!’”¹ From such experi-
ences, Sinclair, like other children of alcoholics, grew up hating
saloons, bars, and all they represented. Sinclair’s friend, poet and
socialist politician Sam DeWitt, described his own childhood in
a New York tenement that contained a bordello. At the age of
five, he had played “brothel” with the neighbor children, “as other
children play hide and seek, and quarreling over whose turn it was
to be the madam.”²
Sinclair, steeped in naval history and fairy tales in Baltimore, met
children like DeWitt when he finally attended a public school in
: “Second Avenue was especially thrilling because the ‘gangs’
came out from Avenue A and Avenue B like Sioux or Pawnees in
war paint, and well-dressed little boys had to fly for their lives.”³
The New York neighborhoods presented a startling contrast to
the sleepy streets of Baltimore, but Priscilla Sinclair still had grand
hopes to preserve gentility in her son. She took him to a church
with a wealthy congregation, the Episcopal Church of Holy Com-
munion, on Sixth Avenue and Twentieth Street. This church, like
the newly completed Central Park, was within walking distance
of the family’s various homes.
Central Park had been designed by Calvert Vaux and Frederick
Law Olmstead to connect rich and poor, Irish immigrants and
Episcopalian aristocrats. In the park, Upton Sinclair played ten-
nis in summer. He ice-skated in the winter on homemade skates,
blades attached to wood platforms fitted with leather straps. With
friends from the neighborhood, he biked all over the city: down
Broadway, across the Brooklyn Bridge, through Prospect Park, and
all the way out to Coney Island.
On the streets of New York City, Upton Sinclair’s education in
politics began. He recalled the election when Harrison defeated
Cleveland; “our torch light paraders, who had been hoping to cel-
ebrate a Democratic triumph, had to change their marching slogan
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Southern Gentlemen Drank
at the last minute . . . the year was and my age was ten.”
The boy sped through eight grammar-school grades in two years.
Although academically qualified to start high school when he was
twelve, he was not allowed to enroll because he was too young.
So at thirteen, he attended a second year of eighth grade. Here he
began to learn American history from a new perspective. Floyd Dell
notes: “His hatred of the sham aristocracy of the South had made
him thrill to the lessons of democracy.” Sinclair would always
be a fervent believer in civic participation and in mass education.
During his father’s many absences, or the times when they were
evicted from a boardinghouse, the boy was oen sent back to the
comforts of Baltimore. At fourteen, he wrote his mother: “I will
spend my money for ball & torpedoes & firecrackers. . . . Uncle B.
took Howard & me to a Turkish bath. We all went into the plunge
. . . had lots of fun.” When visiting Baltimore, Upton discovered
sets of Milton and Shakespeare in his uncle’s library. He found in
Hamlet a figure to shine in his imagination alongside that of Jesus.
In he was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, surely strength-
ening Mrs. Sinclair’s hope that he would indeed become a bishop.
When Upton Sinclair graduated, he donated his collection of
several hundred books to the school, which became its library.
During his final year of high school, a friend named Simon Stern,
from his neighborhood, wrote a story that was printed in a monthly
magazine published by a Hebrew orphanage. Sinclair decided to try
his own hand. He used his hobby of hand-raising young birds: “I
put one of these birds into an adventure, making it serve to prove
the innocence of a colored boy accused of arson.” Just before turn-
ing fourteen, Upton Sinclair sold the story for twenty-five dollars
to the Argosy, the most popular men’s adventure magazine at the
time. It was the beginning of his life as a writer.
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