Upton Sinclair

Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. (1878-1968) was already a famous writer and radical when he settled in Southern California in 1915.

Nine years earlier, his best-selling novel The Jungle had spurred reform of U.S. meat inspection laws and promoted passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Sinclair was an outspoken Socialist and an activist for miners’ rights.

Stormy as his life was before 1915, the years in California produced even greater controversy, and his campaign for Governor in 1934 assured him a permanent place in the state’s political history.

Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Md., on Sept. 20, 1878. His grandfather and great-grandfather had distinguished naval careers (great-grandfather Commodore Arthur Sinclair fought in the first American naval battle of the Revolution). His parents were considered "impoverished Southern gentry." His father was a traveling salesman -- and a heavy drinker. Sinclair, a lifelong teetotaler, wrote often on the subject of alcoholism.

Sinclair earned his way through City College of New York and Columbia University by writing stories for pulp magazines and boys’ weeklies. He joined the Socialist Party in 1902, and with his friend, the future novelist Jack London, helped found the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. He later ran unsuccessfully for Congress from New Jersey.

The Jungle, a blunt and detailed portrayal of unsanitary conditions and labor exploitation in Chicago’s meat-packing industry, was published in 1906 after being serialized in a Socialist weekly. A review by Jack London called it "the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery." President Theodore Roosevelt read the book and reportedly threw his breakfast sausage out the window. He invited Sinclair to the White House and launched an investigation into the appalling conditions described. Legislation followed.

Sinclair used his Jungle earnings to found what he called his "Utopia" –- a cooperative living experiment near Englewood, N.J. Less than a year after it opened, Helicon Home Colony was destroyed by fire. Between then and his migration to California, Sinclair wrote continuously, traveled to Europe, and was arrested for picketing the New York offices of a Rockefeller-controlled mining company during a miners’ strike in Colorado.

In California, Sinclair and his wife Mary Craig bought a modest home in Pasadena, having heard that Pasadena had "no wintry winds, but only sunshine and the Tournament of Roses" – also plenty of tennis, which Sinclair liked to play. Mary Craig filled the house with second-hand furniture, which was all they could afford at the time.

There was nothing second-hand about the guest list at the Sinclairs. Over the years, it came to include Albert Einstein (while he was living in Pasadena as a guest of Caltech), Charlie Chaplin, Henry Ford (who sometimes wintered on an estate in nearby Altadena), King C. Gillette (inventor of the safety razor), Nobel Prize-winning writer Sinclair Lewis, oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, and plumbing heiress Kate Crane Gartz, the latter two being frequent supporters of Socialist causes. Ford and Gillette met several times in the Sinclair living room to discuss their divergent economic and political beliefs. With Einstein, Sinclair developed a warm and lasting relationship; the Sinclair papers housed at Indiana University include 32 letters from the great physicist.

Sinclair was a prolific writer, "a writing machine," in his wife’s words. Critic Alfred Kazin described Sinclair’s talent as "a talent for facts, a really prodigious capacity for social research." He was, said Kazin, "one of the great social historians of the modern era." Sinclair lived to the age of 90, which is approximately the number of books, novels, pamphlets and plays he produced, most of them translated into numerous languages. Few American writers attracted such a large worldwide audience.

The Jungle was only the first of several "muckraking" novels written by Sinclair. (Theodore Roosevelt is credited with first applying the word "muckraker" to social reformers like Sinclair). Other Sinclair works in the genre are Oil!, King Coal, Boston (dealing with the Sacco-Vanzetti trial), and The Brass Check (dealing with "the prostitution of the press"). In The Profits of Religion, a non-fiction work, he attacked aspects of organized religion.

"He became something of an American institution, a one-man reform movement and radical crusader," wrote Morris Dickstein.

Oil! has been described as one of the great novels of Southern California and Sinclair’s most artful and effective work. Published in 1927, it gave fictional life to the frenzy that followed the discovery of oil in Signal Hill, Huntington Beach and Santa Fe Springs in the early 1920s. In a foreword to a 1997 paperback re-issue, Jules Tygiel wrote that Oil! was more than a portrait of ‘20’s life in Southern California. "[It] ultimately spread far beyond the boundaries of Southern California, encompassing World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Teapot Dome and Elk Hills bribery scandals, the fractious battles of the American left, the morality of youth in the roaring twenties, and a broad spectrum of other issues. Yet, Oil! remains at its core what literary critic Lawrence Clark Powell has called, ‘a novel of high California octane…the largest scale of all California novels.’"

In 1934, Sinclair undertook what he called "one of the great adventures of my life" -- his campaign for Governor of California as the Democratic Party nominee during the heart of the Great Depression. Of the 7-million people who lived in California, more than a million were out of work. "[President] Franklin Roosevelt was casting about for ways to end it," Sinclair wrote later in his autobiography. "To me the answer was obvious. 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." As historian Walton E. Bean wrote: "[Sinclair] convinced himself that massive plans of ‘production for use, not for profit,’ which he had long advocated as a socialist, could work within the capitalist system –- that capitalists would buy California state bonds to finance the public enterprises that would put them out of business." Sinclair also favored a $50 monthly pension to widows, the elderly and the handicapped, as well as a tax exemption for homeowners.

With encouragement from friends, Sinclair dropped his Socialist Party registration and entered the Democratic gubernatorial primary. (He had run for Governor as a Socialist in 1926). "I didn’t think I could possibly win, and I was astonished by the tidal wave that came roaring in and gathered me up," Sinclair wrote. Calling his program "End Poverty in California," or EPIC, Sinclair received more votes than his seven Democratic opponents combined. "The menace of utter destitution had radicalized hundreds of thousands of registered Democrats," wrote Bean. In November, he would face the conservative Republican incumbent, Frank F. Merriam.

What followed, wrote historian John D. Weaver, was a campaign "remarkable for the venom, duplicity and sheer terror it produced in an opposition that linked Harry Chandler and William Randolph Hearst, Louis B. Mayer and Aimee Sample McPherson Hutton." The Los Angeles Times warned that Sinclair would "sovietize California and destroy her business and industry by confiscatory taxation and the competition of land and factory communes." He was called everything from a "public enemy" to an example of "perverted masculinity" to "the red devil" for his views on religion. A political ad warned: "Your personal security is at issue -– the welfare of your home and family, your American citizenship, your rights of self-rule and freedom of worship –- your job and your independence." Highway billboards "blazoned warnings of the horrors to come if he was elected," his wife wrote.

Perhaps the most effective anti-Sinclair campaign was that of movie mogul Louis B. Mayer who, wrote Weaver, "turned his Culver City studio into the unofficial headquarters of the film industry’s organized campaign of vilification and misrepresentation." The effort included "fake newsreel interviews with bewhiskered actors voicing their enthusiasm for EPIC in Russian accents. The most effective footage focussed on Central Casting hobos huddled on the borders of California, waiting to live off the bounty of its taxpayers once Sinclair got elected."

Nor was Sinclair popular within the Democratic Party establishment. George Creel, who opposed Sinclair in the Democratic primary, said of him: "Starry-eyed and ecstatic, he believed as implicitly in his nostrums as Peter the Hermit in the validity of the Children’s Crusade." In the end, not even President Roosevelt, the nation’s No. 1 Democrat, endorsed Sinclair.

Despite the opposition, Sinclair received 879,537 votes, but lost to Merriam’s 1,138,620 votes. In her autobiography, Mrs. Sinclair wrote of the tremendous relief she felt. Noting that the campaign had brought Sinclair to the verge of breakdown, she wrote: "I was sure he would never live to take office; and if he did, who would help him. Who would know how?" When defeat was assured on election night, she "sank down to the floor and burst into tears, crying, ‘Oh, thank God! Thank God!’" Comforting her, a friend said: "We understand, Craig. We were all hoping he wouldn’t win." Years later, Sinclair said of the EPIC campaign: "We gave California and all the other states an exciting awareness of what democracy really is."

Sinclair never again sought public office, but his writing and public speaking continued unabated. Political developments overseas disturbed him greatly. A committed humanitarian, he found Soviet Communism and European fascism equally abhorrent. He foresaw the threat that Hitler and Nazism posed to world peace, and later broke with his fellow Socialists by urging early U.S. entry into World War II; he had done the same during World War I when German militarism threatened Europe. His novel Dragon’s Teeth, which dealt with Hitler’s rise to power, won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The book was one of eleven in the popular "Lanny Budd" series of historical novels written between 1940 and 1953.

George Bernard Shaw led an unsuccessful effort to award Sinclair the Nobel Prize for Literature. In a letter to Sinclair, Shaw wrote: "When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime, I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to the authorities, but to your novels."

During the 1940s, the Sinclairs moved from Pasadena to Monrovia, and much later to Arizona for health reasons. It was during this time that Sinclair sold his huge collection of personal papers, books and correspondence to Indiana University for $50,000. His first choice had been the Huntington Library in Pasadena. According to Sinclair, the Library staff supported the purchase, but "I quailed when I learned that the chairman of the board was Mr. Herbert Hoover; and the other members were all eminent gentlemen and plutocratic. I was not favored by the Pasadena gentlemen who control the Huntington Library; my collection was declined."

Sinclair’s wife, collaborator and helpmate throughout much of his life -- Mary Craig Sinclair -– died in 1961 in Pasadena’s St. Luke Hospital. Sinclair remarried at the age of 83. A year before his death, he was invited to the White House by President Johnson to witness the signing of the Wholesale Meat Act of 1967. Sinclair died on Nov. 25, 1968 in Bound Brook, N.J., and is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

Sinclair’s memory is kept alive in Southern California through an annual Upton Sinclair Award dinner honoring social activists. The 17^th such dinner, held in Beverly Hills in 1999, honored historian and author Howard Zinn.

Suggested reading:

Upton Sinclair: The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., N.Y., 1962.

Upton Sinclair: Oil!, University of California Press, 1997, foreword by Jules Tygiel.

May Craig Sinclair: Southern Belle, Sinclair Press, Phoenix, Ariz., 1962.

Walton E. Bean: "Ideas of Reform in California" in "Essays and Assays: California History Reappraised," edited by George H. Knoles, California Historical Society, 1973.

John D. Weaver: Los Angeles, The Enormous Village, Capra Press, Santa Barbara, Calif., 1980

--- contributed by Albert Greenstein, 2000