The Accursed (67 page)

“REVOLUTION IS THE HOUR OF LAUGHTER”

W
as it the great Frenchman Voltaire who’d said these provocative words, as Upton Sinclair believed, or, as his new friend and comrade Yaeger Ruggles asserted, the equally great Frenchman Victor Hugo?

“I will defer to you, Yaeger, as you are far better educated than I! And a year at the Princeton Theological Seminary, and as a preceptor for Woodrow Wilson—those are impressive credentials, indeed.”

Yaeger Ruggles shifted his shoulders uneasily inside his coat. In a rueful tone he said, “It would be good to think so, Upton.”

The friends shook hands on Broadway, at Thirty-first Street, with a plan to meet at a Socialist-suffragette rally three days following, at Union Square. (They had first met two weeks before at a rally on the Bowery of the Socialist Labor Party in support of striking mill-workers in New York City, at which, following a tempestuous rousing speech by Mother Jones, Upton Sinclair had given an earnest, fact-filled speech; Ruggles had introduced himself to Upton afterward, as a “fierce admirer” of
The Jungle
.)

Upton watched the stiff-backed young man stride away, marveling at his dignity, and unusually well-pressed clothes, for a Socialist comrade; he’d felt a thrill of brotherhood with Ruggles, as soon as they’d met. Though not greatly liking the young man’s Southern accent, that was associated with the particular conservatism of the South, deeply entrenched against the labor movement, as against Socialist reform generally.

“He is of ‘mixed race’—is he? Poor fellow! The dark-skinned Negroes will not accept him, as one who is descended from race-rape; and his white brethren will shun him. Only we, his Socialist comrades, can value
him
.”

On the morning of June 16, 1906, Upton Sinclair was bound for Penn Station, where he planned to take the 2:25 p.m. train to Englewood, New Jersey, for a visit of two nights. In the waiting room, Upton seated himself on a bench and began at once to work, for he was one to never waste time—“As if you could kill time, without injuring Eternity”—this remark of Henry David Thoreau was a favorite of his since boyhood.

“Revolution Is the Hour of Laughter” was the inspired title of Upton’s new article for
Everybody’s Magazine,
on the subject of the imminent Socialist transformation of America; an article the young author was sketching out in a virtual fever, for the subject was precious to him.
Man is not intrinsically evil
Upton scribbled on a sheet of yellow foolscap,
but, under Capitalism, immoral behavior is systematically rewarded. By removing Capitalism we therefore remove Evil. This has been most conclusively demonstrated by . . .

At this moment Upton glanced up startled, having heard, he thought, his name called—
UPTON SINCLAIR!
—only just audible amid the cacophony of sounds in the bustling train station. In the way of a turtle shrinking into its shell the young author hunched over his work, for he had been so often besieged of late, as a consequence of his newfound fame (in Socialist circles) or notoriety (all elsewhere), upon the publication of
The Jungle,
he’d come to dread the prospect of being noticed in public places; especially here in Penn Station, where he hoped to work.

Another time, more faintly—
UPTON SINCLAIR!—
but the words were muffled by an announcement of a train due to leave within five minutes at track nineteen, for Boston and points between.

Upton returned to his work, writing with boyish urgency. There was so much to be done!—so much to be done by
him
. Often he suffered veritable brainstorms of ideas for articles, like this for
Everybody’s Magazine,
which, he was thinking, should be a series of articles; and he must soon write a strong letter to the
New York Times
on the subject of an uninformed editorial published there regarding the Meat Inspection Bill passed just last week by Congress; and an equally spirited letter to President Roosevelt, whom he’d visited by invitation, to discuss
The Jungle,
and who had gravely disappointed, if not betrayed, the idealistic young Socialist. Yet more pressingly he was obliged to compose a clear and coherent statement for the newspapers regarding the philosophy of his Socialist Utopian community, to be called the Helicon Home Colony, one day to be situated in a wooded rural area outside Englewood, in the northeastern part of the state; at the very thought of this colony, Upton’s mind was flooded with ideas and plans, and a hope of whom he might invite to live there with him—among Socialist comrades, his new friend Yaeger Ruggles was primary; though the young man had expressed only a guarded sort of friendly interest in the colony. (“Socialist comrades would
live together
? And this would be tolerated by the community?”—so Ruggles had inquired, with some doubt; and Upton had assured him, “This is the United States of America, Yaeger! We may live where we wish, if we can afford it; and we can certainly live with whom we wish.”)

And wasn’t there something else pressing, that Upton had promised to do? Involving Meta and little David, whom he had not seen in weeks?

“So much work, and so precious little time,” Upton murmured to himself, searching through his shabby valise for a fresh sheet of foolscap, “but the ‘Socialist King of the Muckrakers’ must be equal to his challenge, as the prophet Zarathustra was equal to
his
.”

SINCE THAT NIGHT
in MacDougal’s when Jack London and Josiah Slade came to blows, and Upton Sinclair was knocked most unceremoniously to the floor amid much wreckage in the popular Times Square restaurant, numerous events had happened in Upton’s life of an unexpected sort. The romantic isolation of his Princeton farm, where, in his memory, he and Meta had lived as a honeymoon couple, at least at the start, and where Upton had worked so productively, free to write each day as long as his strength allowed, was vanished forever; for
UPTON SINCLAIR
had taken his place, however bashfully, in the headlines of the era.

As an editorial in the
New York Evening World
observed, with a hint of censure: “Not since the youthful poet Lord Byron woke one morning to find himself both famous and notorious, has there been such an example of world-wide celebrity won in a day, and
by a book,
as has come to Upton Sinclair; and now it remains to be seen, how the young Socialist author will behave.”

Upton had immediately fired off a letter protesting that it wasn’t the notorious philanderer Byron with whom Upton Sinclair should be compared, but America’s own, far greater and nobler Harriet Beecher Stowe—“whose masterpiece
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
has changed all of our lives, forever.”

(The
New York Evening World
had kindly published Upton’s letter, which ran the length of two columns, for which Upton Sinclair was grateful, if somewhat surprised. Socialists were accustomed to being disdained, dismissed, or viciously attacked by the enemy press: it was a startling reversal, when the press appeared to cooperate.)

The Jungle
continued to capture the attention of ever more readers, it seemed, as well as the attention of politicians and statesmen; among its renowned readers were the President of the United States and the Honorable Winston Churchill, an Englishman of thirty-two years of age with a seat in Parliament and a respected position in English journalism, as Upton had learned. (Churchill had written an extremely perceptive two-part assessment of
The Jungle
for a progressive English weekly.) Photographers, reporters, and the less scrupulous of the columnists dogged the author’s path; editors who had formerly rejected his most worthy efforts, and dismissed Upton Sinclair as a hack writer, now pleaded with him to write for their magazines, offering such financial enticements, the confused young author could not resist. (“If only I had an assistant!—an indentured servant, or a slave”—so Upton joked to comrades—“I could accept every commission, promote our cause, and make a little profit in the effort.”)

Though sales for
The Jungle
were modest compared to the far more admired and entertaining
The Sea Wolf,
by Jack London, the novel continued to ride the crest of the best-seller list; and so many aroused individuals were writing to the author, he was in despair of finding time to answer them all. (“Ah, I miss Meta!
She
would be ideal to answer these letters in her sincere yet diplomatic manner.”) Most of the letters conveyed enthusiasm for Upton’s exposé of capitalism, and included hair-raising personal accounts of injuries, deaths, and humiliations in the workforce, but a considerable number contained threats, veiled or explicit; others suggested mental derangement in the letter-writers; and numerous letters proposed marriage, or business partnerships, or a new religion, or a vegetarian commune, and the like. Most upsetting were those begging frankly for money, displaying not the least interest in
The Jungle
or in the brotherhood of Socialism itself.

Hardly a day passed without a virulent attack upon the authenticity of the book, which was presented, for reasons of legal caution, as a “novel”; editorials and columns appeared in the Hearst papers particularly, attacking Upton Sinclair’s “integrity, decency, and American patriotism.” All these, Upton felt obliged to answer. And problems had lately arisen regarding the administration of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, in which Upton Sinclair was a founding officer, and Jack London a former president; during London’s brief term, the Society went badly into debt. Yet, at the present time, Upton Sinclair was hoping to save enough money of his own, and perhaps to borrow some, to make a down payment on Helicon Hall, in rural New Jersey, formerly a boys’ private school that had closed in bankruptcy; the price of the entire property was a staggering $34,000 . . .

Recent months had been so strenuous, Upton had suffered a recurrence of ulcers, and was on a very restricted diet indeed, of “primarily white” foods; his daily reading matter included the popular
Physical Culture, Natural Health
by Jeremiah Pym, Ph.D. and M.D. As a (female) comrade-friend had chided Upton: “It won’t do the revolution any good if you’re in pain trying to digest a simple meal, and continue to lose weight as you have been. We need
vigorous speakers,
not
penitent martyrs
.”

Many were the young women, and some not so young, who implored Upton Sinclair to take better care of himself, for the sake of the revolution; and offered to feed him, and even to help clothe and dress him; even to “trim” his hair, that badly needed tending-to.

(“If Meta knew, she would not take me for granted, maybe! She would be jealous, maybe! And not dismiss her husband with scorn.”)

The most immediate result of the financial success of
The Jungle
was the possibility of establishing the Helicon Home Colony within a few months, and not being forced to wait for years, as Upton had expected. (Of course, Upton was obliged to supply financial support to Meta and their child, when he remembered to; in the meantime, it seemed to him that his wife and son were living very contentedly with Meta’s parents in a redbrick house on Staten Island, and did not need much interference from
him
.) Yet, an unfortunate blunder had already been made, by Upton Sinclair, in terms of “public relations”; for in releasing to the press a hastily composed statement on the Colony—

Helicon Home Colony will be an Utopian effort at cooperative living in the midst of the Capitalist state: democratic in principle and practice; devoted to reform, experimentation, and radical theories of education; and to any individual of good moral character who is free from communicable disease and of sound mental health.

—he had drawn a good deal of ridicule and censure upon his head, which he feared he might not soon overcome, as newspapers made merry over the last qualification regarding “communicable disease” and “sound mental health.”

(Indeed, Upton Sinclair could have had no idea how the comical specter of “communicable disease” would be used repeatedly to ridicule his idealistic enterprise; and the phrase “any individual” be deployed to suggest that the Helicon Colony was dedicated to “race mixing” as to “free love” and “atheism.”)
*

“So, this is ‘fame,’ ” Upton mused to himself, in Penn Station, “—being the subject of perpetual attack in the outside world and, in the inner, made sleepless by a racing brain, a fast pulse, and a perpetual queasiness in the southern regions of the belly.”

ONE OF THE MORE
remarkable consequences of the young Socialist’s renown was an invitation to dine at the White House with President Teddy Roosevelt and his famed “tennis cabinet”; for indeed, the eagerly awaited summons finally arrived for Upton Sinclair; and the young author, who’d not long ago written jokes for
Jude, Puck, Graham’s,
and
Life
for one dollar each, and had feared he was prostituting his genius by penning nickel novels under a variety of pseudonyms (“Benjamin Frankman,” “Horatio Linkhorn”), as well as his searing Socialist diatribes, now found himself dining in gentlemanly splendor at the very vortex of political power in Washington, D.C.

Meta will be aggrieved now, when I tell her of this grand occasion,
Upton thought, packing his worn valise with several copies of his earlier books for presentation to the President,
for I am sure she would have wished to accompany me, as my wife.

Yet after the initial excitement of taking the train to the great vaulted station at D.C., and hiking a little distance to the White House, and being ushered into the President’s private dining room, and shaking “Teddy’s” genial hand, and being introduced to “Teddy’s” aides, the young author began to feel a prick of disappointment: for it seemed, though Roosevelt was an affable enough personality with an interest in, as he said robustly,
giving hell to the meat packers,
his attitude toward Upton Sinclair and Socialism generally was not what Upton had hoped.