Remembering Author and Activist Upton Sinclair, Jr.

Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. American novelist, writer, socialist, anti-fascist and later Democratic candidate for governor of California, was born on September 20, 1878 in Baltimore, Maryland,  the only child of Upton Beall Sinclair and Priscilla Harden Apart from his bestselling novels, which tend to paint the realities of the United States at the turn of the century, he is remembered today for championing socialist causes that are naturally unpopular in America and for succeeding in having considerable effects on American politics and legislation. Sinclair’s socialist ideals and dreams found their way to his fiction as he believed that no art can be practiced for art’s sake as long as humanity still suffers from persistent dangers and evils. Such orientations have often subjected Sinclair to harsh criticism and even to demonization from numerous critics and politicians of his time, the most distinguished among which was probably President Theodore Roosevelt. By and large, while Sinclair eventually became an established novelist with more than one novel reaching the status of classic, he remained unsuccessful as a politician. 

Sinclair came from a family evolved from the Southern aristocracy.  His father's family had a distinguished naval tradition dating back to the Revolutionary War.  Following the Civil War and the devastation of the South, the family suffered huge economic losses.  Although Sinclair's immediate family was poor, he had wealthy grandparents in New York; so, he grew up with the unique perspective that living both in poverty and in wealth provided.  His father was a liquor salesman whose alcoholism played a major role in the son's early childhood. 

Upton was a shy, thoughtful boy who taught himself to read at age five. When Sinclair was ten, the family moved to New York, where he began writing dime novels, ethnic jokes, and pulp fiction for various magazines.

A religious child with a great love of literature, Sinclair had two great heroes.Jesus Christ and poet Percy Shelley.whom he felt influenced his life and helped him do well in school. At aged fourteen he entered New York City College. He graduated in 1897 and went to Columbia University to study law, but instead became more interested in politics and literature. He never earned a law degree. Through these years he supported himself by writing for adventure-story magazines. While attending Columbia he wrote eight thousand words a day. He also continued to read a great deal. over one two-week Christmas break he read all of William Shakespeare's (1564–1616) works as well as all of John Milton's (1608–1674) poetry. 

 Sinclair moved to Quebec, Canada, in 1900. That same year he married Meta Fuller, with whom he had a son. His first novel, Springtime and Harvest (1901), was a modest success. Three more novels in the next four years failed to provide even a bare living.

In the early 1900s, Sinclair turned to socialism after reading books such as Merrie England (Robert Blatchford), The People of the Abyss (Jack London), Appeal to the Young (Peter Kropotkin), and Octypus (Frank Norris).

Sinclair became a member of the Socialist Party in 1902, and in September, 1905, he joined with Jack London, Clarence Darrow, and Florence Kelley to form the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. The work of Frank Norris especially influenced him. He later spoke about how Norris had "showed me a new world, and he also showed me that it could be put in a novel."  Sinclair was also influenced by the investigative journalism of Benjamin Flower, Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Ray Stannard Baker. 

He  gained particular fame for his novel, The Jungle (1906), which was intended  to be an exposé of the poor working conditions of industrial labor. His novel became more than that. During the seven weeks that he spent in Chicago’s meatpacking plants, he witnessed the poor working conditions of immigrant laborers. He also witnessed the unsanitary practices of slaughterhouses and meatpackers. He exposed the unsafe labor and sanitary conditions and practices of the meatpacking industry, which caused a public uproar. that partly contributed to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

However, he believed that the main point of The Jungle was lost on the public, overshadowed by his descriptions of unsanitary conditions in the packing plants. The public health concerns dealt with in The Jungle were actually far less significant than the human tragedy lived by his main character and other workers in the plants. His main goal for the book was to demonstrate the inhumane conditions of the wage earner under capitalism, not to inspire public health reforms in how the packing was done. Indeed, Sinclair lamented the effect of his book and the public uproar that resulted: "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

Although President Roosevelt despised Sinclair and his socialist writings, famously calling him a “crackpot,” the phenomenal public interest in the novel seemed to force him to take it seriously and gave orders to take radical action and to investigate meat-packing factories. Nevertheless, President Roosevelt still believed that Sinclair exaggerated in his novel and called the novelist a “muckraker,” a term to be used since to describe writers and journalists who do private investigations to expose the corruption of politicians or business leaders. Sinclair was, thus, established as one of the founding fathers of investigative journalism and “muckraking,” a description of which he was proud of though he was only a writer of fiction.   

Still, the fame and fortune he gained from publishing The Jungle enabled him to write books on almost every issue of social injustice in the twentieth century.

Sinclair also established a socialist commune called Helicon Hall Colony in 1906, with proceeds from his novel The Jungle. One of those who joined was the novelist and playwright Sinclair Lewis, who worked there as a janitor. The colony burned down in 1907, apparently from arson. 

Sinclair divorced his first wife in 1913. The autobiographical (based on his own life) novel Love's Pilgrimage (1911) treats his marriage and the birth of his child with an honesty that shocked some reviewers. Sinclair married Mary Craig Kimbrough in 1913. Sylvia and Sylvia's Marriage, a massive two-part story, called for sexual enlightenment (freedom from ignorance and misinformation).

The success of The Jungle and of its adaptation into cinema in 1914 encouraged Sinclair to produce more fiction and publish numerous other stories. These included the publication of King Coal (1917), based on a coal strike of 1914 and 1915, which returned to labor protest and socialistic comment.and in 1919  The Brass Check which is probably his second most important and most influential book, though he often presented it as his number one. The Brass Check is also a muckraking work that centers on the issue of “yellow journalism” and the limitations of “free press” in the United States.  

In 1917 Sinclair left the Socialist Party to support President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924). He returned to the socialist camp when Wilson supported intervention in the Soviet Union. In California Sinclair ran on the Socialist ticket for Congress (1920), for the Senate (1922), and for governor (1926 and 1930).   

He made his most successful run for office, this time as a Democrat. Sinclair's platform for the California gubernatorial race of 1934, known as EPIC (End Poverty in California), galvanized the support of the Democratic Party, and Sinclair gained its nomination. Conservatives in California were themselves galvanized by this, as they saw it as an attempted Communist takeover of their state and used massive political propaganda portraying Sinclair as a Communist, even as he was being portrayed by American and Soviet Communists as a capitalist following the Que Viva Mexico! debacle. Robert A. Heinlein, the science fiction author, was deeply involved in Sinclair's campaign, a point which Heinlein tried to obscure from later biographies, as Heinlein tried to keep his personal politics separate from his public image as an author. 

Sinclair was defeated by Frank F. Merriam in the election, and largely abandoned EPIC and politics to return to writing. However, the race of 1934 would become known as the first race to use modern campaign techniques like motion pictures. 

Of his gubernatorial bids, Sinclair remarked in 1951: "The American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label. I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC. Running on the Socialist ticket I got 60,000 votes, and running on the slogan to "End Poverty in California" I got 879,000. I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie. There is no use attacking it by a front attack, it is much better to out-flank them." 

He has been criticized for using racial epithets in his books, but Sinclair grew up in the nineteenth century, where epithets were used to refer to people of certain ethnic backgrounds. In his books, he used these to realistically portray the way in which foreigners and minorities were referred to and treated. For example, in his book Oil!, one character uses a disparaging word to refer to non-Jewish people and a different character uses a disparaging word to refer to Jewish people. Some argue that no offense is intended or implied and that the books were written to accurately reflect the way people thought during the time. However in other books, Sinclair goes well beyond the simple use of racial epithets in quotes. For example in The Jungle, it is the narrator who describes African Americans in a highly negative light. To some, this description is meant merely to capture the mindset of the Eastern European immigrants who are the book's protagonists (a group which was itself held in low regard in America at the time). 

To others, the descriptions reflected what was possibly Sinclair's casual racist attitudes that was typical of his time. Shocking nevertheless for a man who was so passionate about  matters concerning  social justice. Although some might argue that at the time The Jungle was published, the epithets against blacks were unnoticed by both his supporters and detractors, likely these were his white supporters, as African American readers would have been offended by the epithets in a post-Plessy v. Ferguson, dawning-of-the-Jim-Crow-Era period.

It is considered erroneous to assume that if the majority classes expressed no offense at Sinclair's views, they were not offensive to his black contemporaries who had no platform on which to express their umbrage with Sinclair's portrayals of them. Nevertheless, The Jungle's impact was far-reaching.  Sinclair helped found the California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union in the 1920s.  Sinclair is well-known for his principle: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." This line has been quoted in many political books, essays, articles, and other forms of media, including Al Gore's 2006 film, An Inconvenient Truth.  He was also firmly in favor of prohibition, most 

Upton Sinclair  was a supporter of Sacco and Vanzetti and his 'documentary novel', 'Boston' (1928), was an indictment of the American system of justice set against the background of the prosecution and execution of the  two anarchists, who themselves feature as characters.

Sinclair faced what he would later call "the most difficult ethical problem of my life," when he was told in confidence by Sacco and Vanzetti's former attorney Fred Moore that they were guilty and how their alibis were supposedly arranged. However, in the letter revealing that discussion with Moore, Sinclair also wrote, "I had heard that he [Moore] was using drugs. I knew that he had parted from the defense committee after the bitterest of quarrels … Moore admitted to me that the men themselves had never admitted their guilt to him." Although this episode has been used by some to claim that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty and that Sinclair knew that when he wrote his novel Boston, this account has been disputed by Sinclair biographer Greg Mitchell

He was also an active supporter of the Industrial Worker's of the World (the IWW) free speech campaigns and strikes and in his anthology, 'The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest' (1915) he collected selections from the likes of Alexander Berkman ('Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist'), Peter Kropotkin ('Memoirs of a Revolutionist'), Voltairine De Cleyre, Francisco Ferrer, Auguste Vaillant, Henry David Thoreau, Octave Mirbeau, Leo Tolstoy, etc. Sinclair wrote extensively on fascism in the 30s and 40s, both in essay and fiction form, including in 'The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America' (1937), 'No Pasaran!: A Novel of the Battle of Madrid' (1937) and .Between 1940 and 1953 Sinclair wrote .the eleven volume Lanny Budd anti-fascist spy series  that, read in sequence, detailed much of the political history of the Western world in the first half of the twentieth century.His hero, Larry Budd, travels the world and meets such figures as Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler. In 1942, his book Dragon’s Teeth, portraying Germany’s descent into Nazism in the 1930s, won the Pulitzer Prize. 

Sinclair continued his tireless and prolific output into the second half of the century, but by the early 1960s, he had turned his attention to Mary, who was in poor health following a stroke. She passed away in 1961, and two years later, at age 83, Sinclair married for a third time, to Mary Willis. 

 Several years later, his own health caused him to move to a nursing home in Bound Brook, New Jersey. He died on November 25, 1968, at the age of 90, having written more than 90 books, 30 plays and countless other works of journalism.  His papers, photographs, and first editions of most of his books are found at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.