“A VERY DEVOUT AND
EARNEST LITTLE BOY”
1878-1892
The old universe was thrown into the ash-heap
and a new one created.
-HENRY ADAMS, THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
He tends to live his private emotions in public.
-HAROLD LASKI ON UPTON SINCLAIR
Upton Sinclair made plenty of enemies over the course
of his long life. It was simply the way he lived. Some hated his
writing, believing his books were hastily assembled, overly contrived, and
overtly political. Some thought him naive and moralistic. Some thought
him puritanical. Some considered him an opportunist, obsessed with self-promotion
rather than telling the truth. Some tired of his proselytizing the
gospel of socialist politics (especially, as Lincoln Steffens once grumbled,
before they could have their morning coffee-one of many drinking habits
Sinclair abhorred). Sinclair recounted once, “I never could give up the
effort to make everybody into a Socialist; naturally I annoyed a great many
people.” One of his numerous critics was the famous journalist and opinion
leader Walter Lippmann, whom Sinclair called an “old friend” since
they had known each other when both were socialists. But before World
War I, Lippmann decided socialism was unrealistic, and in 1927 he wrote
an essay that skewered Sinclair’s utopian flair. Having dumped his youthful
socialism, Lippmann couldn’t understand why others hadn’t as well.
Writing for the Saturday Review of Literature, he lobbed some of the complaints
mentioned above and then argued that Sinclair was fast becoming
irrelevant to national public discussion.
No matter what one thinks of Lippmann’s charges, one claim goes to
the heart of Sinclair’s biography. “The child,” Lippmann explained about
his old friend, “has been father to the man.” Much of Sinclair’s adult life
can be understood from a brief examination of his childhood and the
world he grew into. There is an inherent danger in a biographer’s playing
the role of psychologist, putting the subject under a microscope and examining
a detail of family or a parent and then reading too much into those
things, rushing to a conclusion that only a biographer’s hindsight can
provide. But in Sinclair’s case, the benefits far outweigh the risks.
Examine any photograph of Sinclair from his childhood. There’s one
of him at age eight where all the criticisms of Sinclair the man are already
apparent on the face of the child. He is outfitted in the swankest duds,
which, undoubtedly, his mother had dressed him in, probably hand-medowns
from the wealthier members of her family. As usual, Upton’s lips are
pursed and stiff, like a clenched fist. He stands with his elbow perched on
a chair, his posture more like that of an adult, suggesting his precocious
nature. He wears the self-assuredness that many an only child possesses,
especially those whose mothers are convinced of their future greatness.
There’s a smugness that would not be expected from an eight-year-old. He
is a boy with all the answers, an orientation he retained until the end of
his life. Still, his photograph is similar to photographs taken of other children
at the time. Appearing against a backdrop of gentility, the child
appears to have a sense of dignity and purpose that being born into the
upper ranks of society brought with it. Sinclair’s eyes seem to stare ahead
at some point beyond the photographer’s studio. There’s a sense of a world
where certain expectations are a given: a nice sweet world or at least the
appearance of a nice sweet world. But if Sinclair had looked out, he would
have seen a world in the process of changing, a world that would shake the
foundations of his perceived security.
Eighteen seventy-eight, the year Sinclair entered the world, was a
time when the United States was still overcoming the most cataclysmic
event in its history. The Civil War was thirteen years past, but in its wake
the country had gone through the painful process of figuring out how to
put itself back together. By the time Sinclair was born, Americans were
hoping that a period of reconstruction was over. They hoped that the
South could redeem itself by escaping the scrutinizing eyes of the “Radical
Republicans” who wanted to use their military dominance over the
region to ensure that African Americans would become the equals of white
southerners. Some, both northerners and southerners alike, hoped that
the country could leave behind the world of plantations and slavery and
national strife and unify around a new system that could ensure America’s
economic growth-a new age in which every worker labored for his own
wages in factories that pumped out products for bustling national markets.
The new forces unleashed during Sinclair’s childhood were just as
tumultuous as the gunfire of the Civil War. The railroad roaring to life-with
its speed and its ability to unify disparate communities throughout
the country-symbolized this most of all. Transcontinental lines were
being established, connecting the old frontier of the West with the already
developed East. The trains traveled more quickly than anything people
had seen before. Wealth accumulated at a faster and faster pace, with Sinclair’s
own grandfather a living testimony to this fact, having grown rich
from managing rail lines just outside of Baltimore. The transcontinental
railroads helped a city like Chicago, a city that made Sinclair famous later
in his life, grow at breakneck speed. The United States was experiencing
the power of what Henry Adams called the “dynamo”-new machinery,
speed, and power that tore apart older ways of life.
The railroads not only produced new markets and rapid change, they
also consolidated levels of wealth never before seen. Suddenly in the midst
of the American social scene appeared robber barons, men who sat at the
top of great industrial empires possessing vast sums of money and power.
Cornelius Vanderbilt, for instance, built his wealth “step by step, from the
manipulation of small railroad stocks, wresting profits many times the
millions he originally possessed in short order, until his system of iron
rails was fixed in the industrial heart of the country, all entrenched at its
key positions.” The big bankers of the time, especially J. Pierpont Morgan,
stood ready to lend money; his credit allowed even further expansion of
wealth. America’s iron and oil production-so central to an industrializing
country-thrived, and so grew the wealth of Andrew Carnegie and
John D. Rockefeller. Both of these robber barons wanted strong control
over the way they produced their goods. They exerted power from the top
down, demanding faster output from the workers they employed, ultimately
generating labor conflicts that were as much a mark of the Gilded
Age as was the consolidation of wealth.
One year before Sinclair was born, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877
erupted, one of the most violent and shocking strikes in history. It was a
great spontaneous outpouring of anger, coming as it did before the formation
of national labor unions that could coordinate labor protest. Workers
simply walked off their jobs, no longer willing to work long hours for
meager wages. Word spread throughout the nation and started a whole
wave of strikes. The world of “free labor” that the United States hoped to
rally around after the Civil War began to seem less and less promising. As
the historian Alan Trachtenberg notes, “The 1880’s witnessed almost ten
thousand strikes and lockouts; close to 700,000 workers went out in 1886
alone.” The country seemed on the verge of chaos and breakdown.
At the same time, southern and western farmers were becoming discontented
with the conditions they faced after returning from the Civil
War. In the South, they returned to burned-over farms and to bankers
who charged them more and more to pull themselves out of this situation.
They returned to find railroads increasingly important for shipping their
wares, and they found these railroads charging more and more to ship
their goods, cutting into their profits and killing the notion that the small
farmer was the backbone of the nation’s economy. When these farmers
grew fed up like the workers on the railroad lines, they declared themselves
Populists-believers in the ordinary worker fighting against odds determined
by pernicious wealth. Their anger seethed during Sinclair’s early
years and then erupted into political organizing by the time Sinclair’s picture
was taken at the age of eight. The Populists bellowed their disgust at
the world that surrounded them, complaining in 1892 of a “nation brought
to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin.” The anger of the farmers,
and of the railroad workers before them, would shatter the stability
that many Americans longed for after the bloody Civil War was over. Sinclair
was too young to know of these things, but they would come to shape
his life in profound ways. The secure world of an upright boy in knickers
could no longer hold.
The Fighting Sinclairs
Sinclair’s family tried, but ultimately failed, to keep these changes at bay.
As with all good Victorian families of the time, there was a desire to ensure
that the outside world would never invade their haven. They had reason
to believe the barriers might hold. The big city, the steam machine, the
speed of railroads-these were things associated with the American
North, while Sinclair was born and bred a southerner. In 1904 he would
write, “I am a Southerner and dearly love the South.” Though Sinclair
never really knew the Deep South, his family extended from a lineage of
well-to-do Virginians, the sort of family that would prefer to ignore the
plight of small, poor southern farmers or urban workers.
If Sinclair was not born into wealth, he was born into at least the pretension
of wealth. “I was born in what is called the upper middle class; my
parents were members of the ruined aristocracy of the South,” he explained.
Here you get a sense of how the outside world invaded Sinclair’s life from
an early stage. Sinclair explained in his autobiography: “The family had
lived in Virginia, and there had been slaves and estates. But the slaves had
been set free, and the homestead burned.” As a child, Sinclair poked around
his family’s houses and once pried open an old trunk to discover “reams of
Confederate paper money, now useless.” The time of the South’s greatness
and, to a certain extent, its distinctiveness had passed-that was the lesson
of his family’s fall from grace in the wake of the Civil War. The “New
South” of Sinclair’s boyhood was a time not of plantations but of industrialization,
when the South tried to fill in the holes of northern development
by extracting its crude resources and then sending them north, where factories
would finish them. Cotton growing, coal mining, logging forests,
and crude textile mills-these were the harsh industries of the New South
that ensured that it would remain poorer than the North, even as it
watched the plantations and the world of slavery burn away. The arm to the
forehead as the big house burned down, and people wondering what they
would do next in life-this was the world of young Upton Sinclair.
The change might have been easier for the Sinclairs if the family had not
been so bound to the southern tradition of honor and military virtue. Sinclair’s
family was noted for its naval officers-one after another of the elder
male Sinclairs got on boats and fought it out, all the way up to the Civil War
itself. This military prowess found itself unmoored in the new world of
industrialism. In celebrating factories, railroads, and markets, the British
sociologist Herbert Spencer and his American disciple William Graham
Sumner pointed out, the captains of industry now rightfully displaced the
captains of the military. Gun-fueled heroism now paled in comparison
to the world of pursuing one’s own self-interest by piling up wealth and
reinvesting it in the making of more wealth. A world was dying, and though
people like Spencer and Sumner celebrated it, others hated it. Critics of
northern industrial capitalism-not just socialists-worried about what
would happen to the virtues that only war and its sacrifice could teach young
men. Sinclair, as a boy, first dreamed of becoming the “driver of a hook-andladder
truck” but then soon decided he wanted to go to Annapolis, to
follow in the footsteps of his male predecessors and fight wars on battleships.
When he took up a pen instead, many of his earliest stories dealt
with naval cadets training to become officers or with navy officers escaping
enemy enslavement. Stories about fighting heroes conquering enemies came
naturally to Sinclair. As he matured, he became a swashbuckling captain
himself, fighting evildoers in the realm of wealth and of finance, the perfect
revenge for a boy who watched capitalism displace military prowess.
Sinclair’s father was one of the first men in the family to pursue a career
outside of the military (he had himself done his fair share of fighting). His
career could not symbolize the new forces of capitalism better. He became
a traveling salesman, hawking liquor on the road. It was a manly profession
in its own right-the bartering, cajoling, and talking over cigars and,
of course, drinks. His father looked and acted the part well. He was
sociable and jolly, a short man who had the appearance of the “southern
gentleman” and who, in Sinclair’s own words, was a “swell dresser.” Even
though a charmer, Sinclair’s father had slipped from the world of hearty
military heroes into the ranks of drunken salesmen-next to the southern
gentleman, one of America’s most classic character types. Hawking wares,
drinking away one’s disappointment in life, slapping a client on the back,
and returning to drink. It was especially hard because the men on Sinclair’s
maternal side of the family-Upton’s uncle Bland especially-were doing
extremely well in the new world of competitive markets and acquisitive
individualism. As Upton’s father watched his own fortunes sag and the rest
of the family’s rise, there was plenty of reason to despair.
Because his father was an alcoholic, young Upton developed a strong
sense of responsibility early on. After all, he had to pick his father up out
of the gutters of the Bowery and off the tables of saloons. Sinclair remembered
mustering the courage to walk into a smoke-filled saloon and past
drunken, sometimes violent, imbibers-the “Highway of Lost Men,” he
would later call it-and then try his best to carry his father home, if he was
lucky enough to locate him. In later life Sinclair still remembered the
name of one saloon owner to whom his father was indebted and whose
establishment was “just around the corner from the place where we lived
at that time.” This was fifty years after the time it happened, and still it
haunted Sinclair. These ghosts lived on well past Sinclair’s childhood. As
much as he believed that his commitments in later life drew from the
southern tradition of honor, they also drew from having a father who was
unreliable and the hope that he could create a world of security that his
father had never provided.
No doubt, Sinclair got much of his courage to go into those saloons
from his mother. She was moralistic and stern, upright and proud. In the
simplest of terms, Sinclair was what we would today call a mama’s boy,
often sleeping alone with her in a single-room boardinghouse, when his
father was falling down drunk into gutters. His mother wanted Upton to
be an Episcopal bishop, and she took him to church every Sunday, scrubbing
behind his ears and getting him into his pretty clothes-outfitting
him as a Little Lord Fauntleroy. This would cause problems later and no
doubt do some psychological damage, and as an adult, Sinclair resented his
mother, seeing her as pushy and demanding, the sort of mother who ate
her young. But it’s also true that, in Sinclair’s case as in that of many
others from his generation, the “memories of maternal love,” to quote the
historian Casey Blake, helped nurture his belief that there could be a better
world than the one his father offered the family.
When Sinclair’s father became a drunk and his mother tried her best to
compensate, the family played out a larger change in American history-the
crippling of what some call late-Victorian America. During the late
nineteenth century, upper-middle-class families struggled with the changes
wrought by industrialization. Henry Adams would write one of the most
memorable books in history, his autobiography, in which he recounted how
his own aristocratic lineage was devastated in the face of the “dynamo,” the
small world of Boston torn asunder by railroads and factories. Adams came
from one of the most famous political families in American history, and he
knew that the world of railroads accelerated the ascent of business over
those, like his grandfathers in the past, who managed America’s public
affairs. Adams told a story of decline. It was a story that Sinclair knew,
though his world had the added dimension of the fallen South. His childhood
witnessed a father unable to cope with the changes of the new world,
while his mother tried to uphold an illusion of stability.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Upton Sinclair and the other American Century
by Kevin Mattson Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0-471-72511-0
