book I

remarked, “Dad had moved to another moose”; and this got me into trouble with printers and proofreaders, who would insist upon making “moose” into “house.” I changed it back two or three times--until finally I received a letter from one of the executives of the firm, calling my attention to the difficulty; surely I could not be meaning to say that Dad had moved to a _moose_!

Going back home, I found _Manassas_ about to appear, and this was the psychological moment to make a killing with the magazines. Gertrude Atherton had published in the _North American Review_ an article speculating as to why American literature, with so many opportunities to be robust, should be so bourgeois. I wrote a reply, interpreting American literature in terms of economics; but the _Review_ turned me down. I took the article to _Colliers_, then edited by Norman Hapgood, and he published it. The article was one of the strongest I have ever written, but there was not a line about it in the capitalist newspapers. I could not comprehend this; but now, after it has happened to me so many times, I know what to think.

_Collier’s_ published another article of mine, telling the American people what socialists believed and aimed at. But that was the last. The editors accepted an open letter to Lincoln Steffens about his series of articles on “The Shame of the Cities,” which was appearing in _McClure’s_. I had written a criticism of his articles, pointing out that the corruption he reported came about because big business bought the politicians or elected them; and that there could never be an end to it until the government owned businesses, especially the public utilities. I sent the article to Steffens. He wrote me that it was the best criticism of his work that he had seen; he wanted _McClure’s_ to publish it, but they didn’t dare to. So I turned it into an open letter and sent it to _Collier’s_. I have told in _The Brass Check_ how I was invited to Robbie Collier’s for dinner, and how old Peter Collier, ex-packpeddler, announced to me that he would not permit my articles to appear in his paper and “scare away” his half-million subscribers. The greater part of the letter to Steffens was published in my book, _The Industrial Republic_, long since out of print. It contained a remarkable prophecy of our successive world crises.

Steffens and I became friends at that time. He remained always one of my closest and dearest friends, and we met whenever we were in the same neighborhood. In 1914, I remember, he came out to Croton, near New York, where we had rented a little house, and spent several weekends with us. Once I took him for a tramp in the snow before he had had his coffee. He appealed to my wife never to let that happen again, and she promised.

VI

_Manassas_ appeared, and won critical praise, but sold less than two thousand copies. The “men of this land” did not care about the heritage that was come down to them; or, at any rate, they did not care to hear about it from me. The five-hundred-dollar advance on this book was about all I got for my labors. I had written in the course of four and one half years a total of six novels or novelettes, published four of them, and the sum of my receipts therefrom was less than one thousand dollars.

Nevertheless, _Manassas_ was the means of leading me out of the woods. The editor of the _Appeal to Reason_ read it and wrote me with enthusiasm; I had portrayed the struggle over chattel slavery in America, and now, why not do the same thing for wage slavery? I answered that I would do it, provided he would stake me. The editor, Fred D. Warren, agreed to advance five hundred dollars for the serial rights of the novel, and I selected the Chicago stockyards as its scene. The recent strike had brought the subject to my thoughts; and my manifesto, “You have lost the strike,” had put me in touch with socialists among the stockyard workers.

So, in October 1904 I set out for Chicago, and for seven weeks lived among the wage slaves of the Beef Trust, as we called it in those days. People used to ask me afterward if I had not spent my life in Chicago, and I answered that if I had done so, I could never have written _The Jungle_; I would have taken for granted things that now hit me a sudden violent blow. I went about, white-faced and thin, partly from undernourishment, partly from horror. It seemed to me I was confronting a veritable fortress of oppression. How to breach those walls, or to scale them, was a military problem.

I sat at night in the homes of the workers, foreign-born and native, and they told me their stories, one after one, and I made notes of everything. In the daytime I would wander about the yards, and my friends would risk their jobs to show me what I wanted to see. I was not much better dressed than the workers, and found that by the simple device of carrying a dinner pail I could go anywhere. So long as I kept moving, no one would heed me. When I wanted to make careful observations, I would pass again and again through the same room.

I went about the district, talking with lawyers, doctors, dentists, nurses, policemen, politicians, real-estate agents--every sort of person. I got my meals at the University Settlement, where I could check my data with the men and women who were giving their lives to this neighborhood. When the book appeared, they were a little shocked to find how bad it seemed to the outside world; but Mary MacDowell and her group stood by me pretty bravely--considering that the packers had given them the cots on which the strike breakers had slept during their sojourn inside the packing plants in violation of city laws!

I remember being invited to Hull House to dinner and sitting next to the saintly Jane Addams. I got into an argument with her consecrated band, and upheld my contention that the one useful purpose of settlements was the making of settlement workers into socialists. Afterward Jane Addams remarked to a friend that I was a young man who had a great deal to learn. Both she and I went on diligently learning, so that when we met again, we did not have so much to argue over.

One stroke of good fortune for me was the presence in Chicago of Adolphe Smith, correspondent of the _Lancet_, the leading medical paper of Great Britain. Smith was one of the founders of the Social-Democratic Federation in England, and at the same time an authority on abattoirs, having studied the packing plants of the world for the _Lancet_. Whenever I was in doubt about the significance of my facts--when I wondered if possibly my horror might be the oversensitiveness of a young idealist--I would fortify myself by Smith’s expert, professional horror. “These are not packing plants at all,” he declared; “these are packing boxes crammed with wage slaves.”

At the end of a month or more, I had my data and knew the story I meant to tell, but I had no characters. Wandering about “back of the yards” one Sunday afternoon I saw a wedding party going into the rear room of a saloon. There were several carriages full of people. I stopped to watch, and as they seemed hospitable, I slipped into the room and stood against the wall. There the opening chapter of _The Jungle_ began to take form. There were my characters--the bride, the groom, the old mother and father, the boisterous cousin, the children, the three musicians, everybody. I watched them one after another, fitted them into my story, and began to write the scene in my mind, going over it and over, as was my custom, fixing it fast. I went away to supper, and came back again, and stayed until late at night, sitting in a chair against the wall, not talking to anyone, just watching, imagining, and engraving the details on my mind. It was two months before I got settled at home and first put pen to paper; but the story stayed, and I wrote down whole paragraphs, whole pages, exactly as I had memorized them.

VII

Our life in the little sixteen-by-eighteen cabin had been wretched, and we had set our hearts upon getting a regular farmhouse. We had gone riding about the neighborhood, imagining ourselves in this house and that--I looking for economy, and Corydon looking for beauty, and both of us having the “blues” because the two never came together. Finally Corydon had her way--in imagination at any rate; we chose a farm with a good eight-room house that could be bought for $2,600, one thousand cash and the rest on mortgage. There were sixty acres to the place, with good barns, a wood lot, and three orchards; we imagined a cow, some chickens, a horse and buggy--and persuaded ourselves that all this would pay for itself.

Now, before starting on _The Jungle_, I went to call upon Dr. Savage, who had married us; I poured out my woes upon his devoted head. I told him how Corydon had come close to suicide the previous winter and how I dreaded another siege in our crowded quarters. I so worked upon his feelings that he agreed to lend me a thousand dollars, and take another mortgage on the farm as security. Poor, kind soul, he must have listened to many a painful story in that big church study of his! He assured me he was not a rich man, and I was glad when I was able to repay the money at the end of a year.

We moved into the new, palatial quarters, elegantly furnished with odds and ends picked up at the “vendues” that were held here and there over the countryside whenever some one died or moved away. You stood around in the snow and stamped your feet, and waited for a chance to bid on a lot of three kitchen chairs, with one seat and two rungs missing, or a dozen dishes piled in a cracked washbasin. You paid cash and had twenty-four hours in which to fetch your goods. I purchased a cow at such a sale, also a horse and buggy.

For my previous winters writing I had built with my own hands a little cabin, eight feet wide and ten feet long, roofed with tar paper, and supplied with one door and one window. In it stood a table, a chair, a homemade shelf for books, and a little round potbellied stove that burned coal--since the urgencies of inspiration were incompatible with keeping up a wood fire. This little cabin was now loaded onto a farmer’s wagon and transported to the new place, and set up on an exposed ridge; in those days I valued view more than shelter, but nowadays I am less romantic, and keep out of the wind. To this retreat I repaired on Christmas Day, and started the first chapter of _The Jungle_.

For three months I worked incessantly. I wrote with tears and anguish, pouring into the pages all the pain that life had meant to me. Externally, the story had to do with a family of stockyard workers, but internally it was the story of my own family. Did I wish to know how the poor suffered in wintertime in Chicago? I had only to recall the previous winter in the cabin, when we had had only cotton blankets, and had put rugs on top of us, and cowered shivering in our separate beds. It was the same with hunger, with illness, with fear. Ona was Corydon, speaking Lithuanian but otherwise unchanged. Our little boy was down with pneumonia that winter, and nearly died, and the grief of that went into the book.

VIII

Three months of incessant work and little exercise put my stomach nearly out of commission. A relative offered me some kind of pass on a steamer to Savannah, and I took this trip, and went on to Florida, and spent a couple of weeks roaming the beaches and fishing in the surf; I came back refreshed, and put in the spring and summer on my task. The story had begun in the _Appeal to Reason_--circulation half a million--and I was getting letters from readers; I realized that this time I had something that would be read. “I am afraid to trust myself to tell you how it affects me,” wrote David Graham Phillips.

Of course I had some human life during that year. There were times when the country was beautiful; when the first snow fell, and again when the peach orchard turned pink, the pear orchard white, and the apple orchard pink and white. We had a vegetable garden, and had not yet discovered that it cost us more than buying the vegetables. We bought some goose eggs, hatched a flock of eight or ten, and chased them all over the countryside until one day they disappeared into the stomachs of the foxes or the Jukeses. I worked on the place all my spare time in summer and became a jack-of-all-trades. I drove a hayrake, which was picturesque and romantic--except that the clouds of pollen dust set me to sneezing my head off. I was continually catching cold in those days, and was still at the stage where I went to doctors, and let them give me pills and powders, and pump my nose full of red and blue and green and yellow-colored liquids, which never had the slightest effect that I could discover.

Shortly before the completion of the book, I set to work at the launching of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. I had reflected much upon my education in college and university, and made sure that my ignorance of the modern revolutionary movement had not been an accident. Since the professors refused to teach the students about modern life, it was up to the students to teach themselves; so I sent a circular letter to all the college socialists I knew of and invited them to organize. On September 12, 1905, we had a dinner at Peck’s Restaurant on Fulton Street in New York, and chose Jack London as our president. The newspapers gave three or four inches to the doings of this peculiar set of cranks. I remember calling up the secretary of some university club to ask for the membership list, and I could not make him understand the strange name of our organization. “Intercollegiate _Socialist_ Society, you say?” The Catholic Anarchist League, the Royal Communist Club, the Association of Baptist Bolsheviks!

We had no income, of course, and everything was done by volunteer labor. Many times I sat up until two or three in the morning, wrapping packages of literature to be mailed to persons who did not always want them and sometimes wrote to say so. One who attended our first meeting was a young student at Wesleyan by the name of Harry Laidler, and for several years it was my dream that some day we might have an income of eighteen dollars per week so that Harry could be our full-time secretary. The organization, now known as the League for Industrial Democracy, has not merely Harry W. Laidler but Norman Thomas also, and has raised about fifty thousand dollars a year. Not so much, compared with the resources of the power trust, but we have interested and trained two generations of socialists, progressives, and liberals. The league has been at the same address, 112 East 19th Street, New York, for some fifty-five years--in itself an achievement; if you want to know about it, send a postcard.

Soon after our start, we organized a mass meeting at Carnegie Hall at which the principal speaker was to be Jack London. I had corresponded with him from the time of his first novel. At this time he had had his great success with _The Sea Wolf_. He was on the crest of the wave of glory and a hero in the movement of social protest. He was traveling from California to Florida by sea, then by train to New York, and he was due to arrive on the very evening of the meeting. His train was late, and I had been asked to keep the crowd entertained until he arrived. The hall was packed. I was in something of a panic because I didn’t think that I was equal to the assignment. But just as I started for the platform, a roar of cheers broke out--our hero and his wife were walking down the aisle.

Jack was not much taller than I, but he was broadly built--the picture of an athlete. That night he gave us the substance of his famous discourse, “Revolution,” later published in a little red paper pamphlet. The crowd that listened so raptly was not, I must admit, very collegiate. A few students came, but most of the audience was from the Lower East Side; the ushers were Jewish boys and girls wearing red badges. The socialist fervor of that evening now seems like even more ancient history than it is. A good part of it went into the communist movement, of course, and my friend Scott Nearing used to ask me how I could continue to belong to the Socialist Party, made up of lawyers and retired real-estate speculators!

IX

The first chapters of _The Jungle_ had been read by George P. Brett of the Macmillan Company, who was impressed by the book, and gave me an advance of five hundred dollars. The last chapters were not up to standard, because both my health and my money were gone, and a second trip to Chicago, which I had hoped to make, was out of the question. I did the best I could--and those critics who didn’t like the ending ought to have seen it as it was in manuscript! I ran wild at the end, attempting to solve all the problems of America; I put in the Moyer-Haywood case, everything I knew and thought my readers ought to know. I submitted these chapters to a test and got a cruel verdict; the editor of the _Appeal_ came to visit me, and sat in my little living room one evening to hear the story--and fell sound asleep! The polite author went on reading for an hour or so, hoping that his guest would wake up and be spared the embarrassment of being “caught!” (I cut the material out.)

I was called to New York for an interview with Mr. Brett. He wanted me to cut out some of the “blood and guts” from the book; nothing so horrible had ever been published in America--at least not by a respectable concern. Brett had been a discerning but somewhat reserved critic of my manuscripts so far; if I had taken his advice, I would have had an easier time in life--but I would have had to be a different person. Out of his vast publishing experience he now assured me that he could sell three times as many copies of my book if I would only consent to remove the objectionable passages; if I were unwilling to do this, his firm would be compelled to decline the book. I remember taking the problem to Lincoln Steffens, an older muckraker than I. Said he: “It is useless to tell things that are incredible, even though they may be true.” But I could not take his advice; I had to tell the truth, and let people make of it what they could.

I forget who were the other publishers that turned down _The Jungle_. There were five in all; and by that time I was raging and determined to publish it myself. The editor of the _Appeal_ generously consented to give space to a statement of my troubles. Jack London wrote a rousing manifesto, calling on the socialist movement to rally to the book, which he called “the _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ of wage slavery. It is alive and warm. It is brutal with life. It is written of sweat and blood, and groans and tears.” I offered a “Sustainer’s Edition,” price $1.20, postpaid, and in a month or two I took in four thousand dollars--more money than I had been able to earn in all the past five years. Success always went to my head, and I became drunk, thinking it was going to be like that the rest of my life; and so I could found a colony, or start a magazine, or produce a play, or win a strike--whatever might be necessary to change the world into what it ought to be.

In this case the first thing I did was to buy a saddle horse for a hundred and twenty-five dollars. It wasn’t as reckless as it sounds because the horse could also be driven to the buggy, and I had to have some form of exercise to help the poor stomach that apparently was not equal to keeping up with the head. Also I had to have some way to get into town quickly, because I now had a business on my hands and had to be sending telegrams and mailing proofs. I had a printing firm in New York at work putting _The Jungle_ into type. Then, just as the work was completed, someone suggested that I offer the book to Doubleday, Page and Company. So I found myself in New York again, for a series of conferences with Walter H. Page and his young assistants.

This publisher and editor played an important part in American history, so I will tell what I saw of him. He was extremely kind and extremely naïve; being good himself, he believed that other people were good; and just as he was swallowed alive by Balfour and other British Tories during World War I, so he was very nearly swallowed by the Chicago packers. Anxious not to do anybody harm in such a good and beautiful world, he submitted the proofs of _The Jungle_ to James Keeley, managing editor of the Chicago _Tribune_ and a highly honorable gentleman, who sent back a thirty-two page report on the book, prepared, so Keeley avowed, by one of his reporters, a disinterested and competent man. I sat down to a luncheon with the firm, at which this report was produced, and I talked for two or three hours, exposing its rascalities. I persuaded the firm to make an investigation of their own, and so they sent out a young lawyer, and the first person this lawyer met in the yards was a publicity agent of the packers. The lawyer mentioned _The Jungle_, and the agent said, “Oh, yes, I know that book. I read the proofs of it and prepared a thirty-two page report for James Keeley of the _Tribune_.”

X

The young lawyer’s report upheld me, so Doubleday, Page agreed to bring out the book, allowing me to have a simultaneous edition of my own to supply my “sustainers.” The book was published in February 1906, and the controversy started at once. The answer of the packers appeared in a series of articles by J. Ogden Armour in the _Saturday Evening Post_, whose editor was Armour’s former secretary, George Horace Lorimer. The great packer did not condescend to name any book, but he referred in dignified fashion to the unscrupulous attacks upon his great business, which was noble in all its motives and turned out products free from every blemish. I remember reading this canned literature in Princeton, and thinking it over as I rode my new saddle horse back to the farm. I was boiling, and automatically my material began to sort itself out in my mind. By the time I got home, I had a reply complete, and sat down and wrote all through the night; the next morning I had an eight-thousand-word magazine article, “The Condemned Meat Industry.”

I took the first train for New York, and went to _Everybody’s Magazine_, which had just electrified the country with Thomas W. Lawson’s exposure of Wall Street methods. I figured they would be looking for something new, and I asked to see the publisher of the magazine--realizing that this was a matter too important to be decided by a mere editor. I saw E. J. Ridgway and told him what I had, and he called in his staff of editors. I read them the article straight through and it was accepted on the spot, price eight hundred dollars. They stopped the presses on which the May issue of the magazine was being printed, and took out a story to make room for mine. Two lawyers were summoned, and once more I had to go over my material line by line, and justify my statements.

It was dynamite, no mistake. Bob Davis, of _Munsey’s Magazine_--how I blessed him for it!--had introduced me to a wild, one-eyed Irishman who had been a foreman on Armour’s killing beds and had told under oath the story of how the condemned carcasses, thrown into the tanks to be destroyed, were taken out at the bottom of the tanks and sold in the city for meat. The Armours had come to him, and offered him five thousand dollars to retract his story; by advice of a lawyer he accepted the money and put it in the bank for his little daughter, and then made another affidavit, telling how he had been bribed and why. I had both these affidavits; also I had the court records of many pleas of guilty that Mr. Armour and his associates had entered in various states to the charge of selling adulterated meat products. It made a marvelous companion piece to Mr. Armour’s canned literature in the _Saturday Evening Post_.

The article in _Everybody’s_ was expected to blow off the roof. But alas, it appeared on the newsstands on April 20, and April 19 was the date selected by the Maker of History for the destruction of San Francisco by earthquake and fire. So the capitalist news agencies had an excuse for not sending out any stories about “The Condemned Meat Industry!” I have met with that sort of misfortune several times in the course of my efforts to reach the public. In 1927 I traveled all the way across the continent in order to make war on the city of Boston for the suppression of my novel, _Oil!_; and just as I set to work, Lindbergh landed in America after his flight to France! For a couple of weeks there was nothing in the American newspapers but the “lone eagle” and the advertisements.

XI

However, _The Jungle_ made the front page a little later, thanks to the efforts of the greatest publicity man of that time, Theodore Roosevelt. For the utilizing of Roosevelt in our campaign, credit was claimed by Isaac F. Marcosson, press agent for Doubleday, Page and Company, in his book, _Adventures in Interviewing_. If I dispute his exclusive claim, it is because both of us sent copies of the book to the President, and both got letters saying that he was investigating the charges. (Roosevelt’s secretary later told me that he had been getting a hundred letters a day about _The Jungle_.) The President wrote to me that he was having the Department of Agriculture investigate the matter, and I replied that that was like asking a burglar to determine his own guilt. If Roosevelt really wanted to know anything about conditions in the yards, he would have to make a secret and confidential investigation.

The result was a request for me to come to Washington. I was invited to luncheon at the White House, where I met James R. Garfield, Francis E. Leupp, and one or two other members of the “tennis cabinet.” We talked about the packers for a while; said “Teddy”: “Mr. Sinclair, I bear no love for those gentlemen, for I ate the meat they canned for the army in Cuba.” Presently he fell to discussing the political situation in Washington. At this time _Cosmopolitan_ was publishing a series of articles called “The Treason of the Senate,” by the novelist David Graham Phillips, which revealed the financial connections and the reactionary activities of various Senators. (The articles were basically sound, though I had the impression that Phillips, whom I knew rather well, was longer on adjectives than on facts.) The President called the roll of these traitors, and told me what he knew about each one. I sat appalled--what, after all, did Theodore Roosevelt know about me? I was a stranger, a young socialist agitator, from whom discretion was hardly to be expected; yet here was the President of the United States discussing his plans and policies, and pouring out his rage against his enemies--not even troubling to warn me that our talk was confidential.

I was so much amused by his language that when I left the White House, the first thing I did was to write out, while I remembered it, his words about Senator Hale of Maine, whom he called “the Senator from the Shipbuilding Trust.” If you want to get the full effect of it, sit at a table, clench your fist, and hit the table at every accented syllable: “The most in-_nate_-ly and es-_sen_-tial-ly mal-_e_-vo-lent _scoun_-drel that _God_ _Almight_-_y_ _ev_-er _put_ on _earth_!” I perceived after this session the origin of what the newspapermen of Washington called “the Ananias Club.” I was assumed to know that the President’s words were not meant to be quoted; and if I broke the rule, “Teddy” would say I was a liar, and the club would have a new member.

A curious aspect of this matter: it was only a few weeks later that Roosevelt made his famous speech denouncing the “muckrakers.” The speech named no names but was generally taken to refer to David Graham Phillips on account of his “Treason of the Senate” articles; and this gave great comfort to the reactionaries. Yet Phillips in his wildest moment never said anything against the Old Guard senators more extreme than I had heard Roosevelt say with his own lips at his own luncheon table. Needless to say, this experience did not increase my respect for the game of politics as played in America.

I was sent to see Charles P. Neill, labor commissioner, and James Bronson Reynolds, a settlement worker, the two men who had been selected to make the “secret and confidential” investigation. I talked matters out with them, promised silence, and kept the promise. But when I got back to Princeton, I found a letter from Chicago telling me it was known that the President was preparing an investigation of the yards and that the packers had men working in three shifts, day and night, cleaning things up. I found also waiting for me a business gentleman with dollar signs written all over him, trying to interest me in a proposition to establish an independent packing company and market my name and reputation to the world. This gentleman haunted my life for a month, and before he got through he had raised his bid to three hundred thousand dollars in stock. I have never been sure whether it was a real offer, or a well-disguised attempt to buy me. If it was the latter, it would be the only time in my life this had happened; I suppose I could consider that I had been complimented.

XII

Roosevelt’s commissioners asked me to go to Chicago with them; but I have never cared to repeat any work once completed. I offered to send a representative to put the commissioners in touch with the workers in the yards. For this I selected two socialists whom I had come to know in the “local” in Trenton, Ella Reeve Bloor and her husband. Mrs. Bloor had five small children, but that never kept her from sallying forth on behalf of the cause. She was a little woman, as tireless as a cat; the war converted her to Bolshevism, and her five children became active communist workers, and she herself became “Mother Bloor,” gray-haired, but hardy, and familiar with the insides of a hundred city jails. I paid the expenses of her and her husband for several weeks, a matter of a thousand dollars. You will find me dropping a thousand here and a thousand there, all through the rest of this story; I can figure up seventy-five of them, all spent on causes--and often spent before I got them.

The commissioners obtained evidence of practically everything charged in _The Jungle_, except that I was not able to produce legal proof of men falling into vats and being rendered into pure leaf lard. There had been several cases, but always the packers had seen to it that the widows were returned to the old country. Even so, there was enough to make a terrific story if it got into the newspapers. It had been Roosevelt’s idea to reform the meat-inspection service, and put the bill through Congress without any fuss. But the packers themselves prevented this by their intrigues against the bill. Finally, with the tacit consent of the commission, I put the New York _Times_ onto the track of Mr. and Mrs. Bloor, and the whole story was on the front page next day. So Roosevelt had to publish the report, and the truth was out.

I moved up to New York and opened an amateur publicity office in a couple of hotel rooms, with two secretaries working overtime. I gave interviews and wrote statements for the press until I was dizzy, and when I lay down to sleep at two o’clock in the morning, my brain would go on working. It seemed to me that the walls of the mighty fortress of greed were on the point of cracking; it needed only one push, and then another, and another. In the end, of course, they stood without a dent; the packers had lost a few millions, but they quickly made that up by advertising that their products were now guaranteed pure by the new government inspection service. A year later Mrs. Bloor went back, this time with a reporter from the New York _Herald_. They worked in the yards for many weeks and found all the old forms of graft untouched. Their story was killed by James Gordon Bennett, as I have related in _The Brass Check._

In the midst of all this there came to my aid a powerful voice from abroad. The Honorable Winston Churchill, thirty-two years of age, was a member of Parliament and a journalist with a large following. He published a highly favorable two-part article on _The Jungle_ in an English weekly with the odd name of P.T.O.--the initials, with the first two reversed, of the editor and publisher, T. P. O’Connor. (Because O’Connor was an Irishman, you say it “Tay Pay O.”) I quote the first and last paragraphs of Churchill’s articles, which ran to more than five thousand words.

When I promised to write a few notes on this book for the first number of Mr. O’Connor’s new paper, I had an object--I hoped to make it better known. In the weeks that have passed that object has disappeared. The book has become famous. It has arrested the eye of a warm-hearted autocrat; it has agitated the machinery of a State department; and having passed out of the sedate columns of the reviewer into leading articles and “latest intelligence,” has disturbed in the Old World and the New the digestions, and perhaps the consciences, of mankind....

It is possible that this remarkable book may come to be considered a factor in far-reaching events. The indignation of millions of Americans has been aroused. That is a fire which has more than once burnt with a consuming flame. There are in the Great Republic in plentiful abundance all the moral forces necessary to such a purging process. The issue between Capital and Labour is far more cleanly cut to-day in the United States than in other communities or in any other age. It may be that in the next few years we shall be furnished with Transatlantic answers to many of the outstanding questions of economics and sociology upon whose verge British political parties stand in perplexity and hesitation. And that is, after all, an additional reason why English readers should not shrink from the malodorous recesses of Mr. Upton Sinclair’s “Jungle.”

In the fifty-six years that have passed, Winston Churchill has become one of the most famous names in history. I am pleased by what he said about my book. But I cannot help wondering if he would have written as freely if I had dealt with the horrors I saw in the slums of London seven years later, or of conditions in the mining towns of which I learned from John Burns, who represented the miners in Parliament.

I had now “arrived.” The New York _Evening World_ said, “Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself famous has there been such an example of world-wide celebrity won in a day by a book as has come to Upton Sinclair.” _The Jungle_ was being translated into seventeen languages, and was a best seller in America and in Great Britain for six months. Photographers and reporters journeyed to Princeton, hired hacks and drove out to my farm, and the neighbors who had been selling me rusty machinery and broken-down mules suddenly discovered that I had “put them on the map.” Editors wrote or telegraphed commissions, and I was free to name my own price. My friend William Dinwiddie, sent by the New York _Evening World_ to get me to write something for them, first got me to sign a contract at five cents a word, and then said: “Sinclair, the first thing you need to learn is to charge.” So I doubled my price to the next paper--and might just as well have quadrupled it.

How did it feel to be famous? I can truly say that it meant little to me personally. I got few thrills. I had suffered too much and overstrained whatever it is that experiences thrills. If I had been thinking about my own desires, I would have taken the first train to the wilderness and never come back to crowds and excitement; but I stayed, because “fame” meant that newspapers and magazines would print a little bit of what I wanted to say, and by this means the wage slaves in the giant industries of America would hear some words in their own interest.

XIII

In the third chapter of this narrative, I mentioned one “Jonesy,” a city inspector of fruit who was the hero of “Jerome’s lemon story.” I promised to tell another tale about this Jonesy, and here is the place where it comes in.

I had made some examination of the slaughterhouses in and near New York, and stated in a newspaper article that conditions in them were no better than in Chicago. This aroused the head of New York City’s health department, who denounced me as a “muckraker,” and challenged me to produce evidence of my charges. The reporters came on the run; and to one of them, who happened to be a friend, I made a laughing remark: “It happens that I know a certain inspector of fruit, a subordinate of the health commissioner’s, who manages to keep a motorcar and a mistress on a salary of a couple of thousand dollars a year. How do you suppose he does it?” The remark was not meant for publication, but it appeared in next morning’s paper.

At about ten o’clock that evening, a reporter called me on the phone at my hotel. Said he: “I want to give you a tip. The commissioner is taking you up on that statement about the city fruit inspector who keeps a motorcar and a mistress. He knows who the man is, of course, but he figures that you won’t dare to name him because he’s a friend of your family’s. So he is writing you a letter, calling you a liar, and daring you to name the man. He has sent the letter to the papers, and I have a copy of it.”

There was a pretty kettle of fish! As matters actually stood, I had no legal evidence of Jonesy’s graft--only the word of Jonesy s family, the frequent family jokes. It would have been awkward to name him--but still more awkward to let a Tammany politician, who happened to be Jonesy’s boon companion, destroy the work I was trying to do.

I called Jonesy’s home on the phone, and his wife--whom I knew--told me he was out. I tried his club, and several other places, and finally called the wife again. I explained that it was a matter of the greatest urgency and that I could think of only one thing to do: would she please give me the telephone number of her husband’s mistress?

So at last I got my victim on the phone and spoke as follows: “The commissioner has sent to the newspapers a letter challenging me to name the fruit inspector who is a grafter. I didn’t intend for this to be published, and I’m sorry it happened, but I refuse to let the commissioner brand me before the public and destroy my work. If his challenge is published, I shall name you.”

The tones of Jonesy were what in my dime novels I had been wont to describe as “icy.” Said he: “I suppose you know there are libel laws in this country.” Said I: “That’s my lookout. I think I know where I can get the proofs if I have to. I’m telling you in advance so that you may stop the commissioner. Call him at once and tell him that if that letter is published, I shall name you, and name him as your friend and crony.”

What happened after that I never heard. I only know that the letter did not appear in any New York newspaper.

XIV

Roosevelt sent me a message by Frank Doubleday: “Tell Sinclair to go home and let me run the country for a while.” But I did not accept the advice. I broached to _Everybody’s Magazine_ the idea of a series of articles exposing the conditions under which children worked in industry. They thought this a promising idea and agreed to use a series of eight or ten such articles. Alas, being new at the game, I omitted to tie them down with a contract. I took Mrs. Bloor and went down to the glass factories of southern New Jersey in the heat of midsummer, and I spent my time watching little boys of ten and twelve working all night in front of red-hot furnaces. One story I remember: an exhausted child staggering home at daybreak, falling asleep on the railroad tracks, and being run over by a train. I lived in the homes of these workers, I talked with them and ate their food, and in later years I put some of them into my books. Always the critics say--without knowing anything about it--that I “idealize” these characters. I can only say that if there is any finer type in the world than the humble workingman who has adopted brotherhood as his religion and sacrifices his time and money and often his job for his faith, I have not encountered it.

I went next to the Allegheny steel country, the real headquarters of American wage slavery in those old days. What I wrote horrified _Everybody’s_, and they changed their minds about my series. So I had to rest, whether I would or not.

It was high time; for one of my teeth became ulcerated, and I had a painful time, wandering about the city of Trenton on a Sunday, trying in vain to find a dentist. After two nights of suffering I went to a dentist in New York, had the tooth drilled through, and for the first time in my life nearly fainted. Afterward I staggered out, went into the first hotel I saw, and got a room and fell on the bed. It happened to be a fashionable hotel, and this gave great glee to the newspapers, which were pleased to discover signs of leisure-class follies in a socialist.

There is a saying among women that every child costs a tooth. With me it read: every crusade costs a tooth. Of course this wasn’t necessary; it was not merely overwork but ignorance of diet, the eating of white flour and sugar and other denatured foods, and pouring into the drain pipe the mineral salts from fruits and vegetables. But I did not know anything about all this; my college education, which had left out socialism, and money, and love and marriage, had also left out diet and health. Instead of such things, I had learned what a _hapax legomenon_ is, and a _pons asinorum_, and a _glyptocrinus decadactylus_--and was proud of possessing such wisdom.

Another activity during that summer and autumn of 1906 was an effort to turn _The Jungle_ into a play. Arch and Edgar Selwyn were playbrokers at this time and suggested Edgar’s wife as my collaborator. Margaret Mayo afterward wrote a highly successful farce-comedy, _Baby Mine_, but _The Jungle_ was something different, and I fear we made a poor dramatization. We had a manager who was thinking of nothing but making money, and some slapstick comedians put in dubious jokes that I, in my innocence, did not recognize until I heard the gallery tittering. The play came to New York for six weeks and lost money--or so I was told by the managers, with whom I had invested three thousand dollars.

Concerning _The Jungle_ I wrote that “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” I helped to clean up the yards and improve the country’s meat supply. Now the workers have strong unions and, I hope, are able to look out for themselves.

_6_

_Utopia_

I

Three winters spent upon an isolated farm had taken all the romance out of the back-to-nature life for a young author. The roads were either deep with mud or cut with the tracks of sleighs, so that the only place to walk was up and down in a field, along the lee side of a fence. Also, four summers had taken the romance out of agriculture as an avocation for a literary man. The cows broke into the pear orchard and stuffed themselves and died; the farmhands who were brought from the city got drunk and sold the farm produce for their own benefit. “Away from nature!” became the slogan.

The young writer, who had been close to starving for the past five or six years, now had thirty thousand dollars, in hand or on the way, and it was burning holes in all his pockets. He had never heard of such a thing as investing money, and would have considered it an immoral thing to contemplate. He wanted to spend his money for the uplifting of mankind, and it was characteristic of him that even in the matter of getting a home he tried to combine it with the solving of a social problem, and with setting an example to his fellowmen.

As a socialist Thyrsis of course believed in co-operation, and regarded the home as the most ancient relic of individualism. Every person had, or sought to have, his own home, and there lived his own little selfish life, wasteful, extravagant, and reactionary. It did not occur to Thyrsis that not every home might be as unhappy as his own; if anyone had suggested the idea to him, he would have said that no one should be happy in a backward way of life, and he would have tried to make them unhappy by his arguments.

His plan was to establish a co-operative home, to demonstrate its practicability and the wider opportunities it would bring. There was nothing revolutionary about this idea; it was being practiced in many parts of America--only people were doing it without realizing what they were doing. Up in the Adirondacks were clubs where people owned the land in common and built individual cabins, or rented them from the club, and had a common kitchen and dining room; they ran their affairs, as all clubs are run, on a basis of equality and democracy. Only the members didn’t use these radical phrases and made no stir in the newspapers.

Thyrsis, for his part, had to make a stir in the papers, else how could he find anybody to go into a club with him? He knew but few persons, and only two or three of these were ready for the experiment. How could others be found? It might have been done by personal inquiry, but that would have been a slow process; when Thyrsis wanted anything, he wanted it at once. Being a modern, up-to-date American, he shared the idea that the way to get something was to advertise. So he wrote an article for the _Independent_ (June 4, 1906), outlining his plan for a “home colony” and asking to hear from all persons who were interested. Soon afterward he rented a hall, and announced in the newspapers that a series of discussion and organization meetings would be held.

II

Many persons came; some of them serious, some of them cranks, some of them both. The process of sorting them out was a difficult one, and was not accomplished without heart-burning. There is no standard test for cranks, and there were some with whom Thyrsis could have got along well enough but who were not acceptable to the rest of the group. There were some who quietly withdrew--having perhaps decided that Thyrsis was a crank.

Anyhow, the new organization came into being. A company was formed, stock issued, and the world was invited to invest. In this, as in other reform schemes, Thyrsis found that it was possible to raise about one tenth of the money, and necessary to put up the rest out of one’s own pocket. A search was begun for a suitable building; and real-estate agents came swarming, and broken-down hotels were inspected and found unsuitable. Finally there came better tidings; some members of the committee had stumbled upon a place with the poetical name of Helicon Hall.

It stood on the heights behind the Palisades, overlooking Englewood, New Jersey, just above the Fort Lee ferry from New York. It had been a boys’ school, and there was a beautiful building planned by an aesthetic-minded pedagogue who hoped that boys could be civilized by living in dignified surroundings and by wearing dress suits every evening for dinner. There were two or three acres of land, and the price was $36,000, all but ten thousand on mortgage. Thyrsis, of course, knew nothing about real estate, what it was worth, or how one bought it; but the sellers were willing to teach him, and in a day or two the deal was made.

So, from November 1, 1906, to March 7, 1907 (at three o’clock in the morning, to be precise), the young dreamer of Utopia lived according to his dreams. Not exactly, of course, for nothing ever turns out as one plans. There were troubles, as in all human affairs. There was a time when the co-operative mothers of the Helicon Home Colony charged that the head of the children’s department had permitted the toothbrushes to get mixed up; there was a time when the manager in charge of supplies forgot the lemons, and it was necessary for Thyrsis to drive to town and get some in a hurry. But in what home can a writer escape such problems?

III

The most obvious success was with the children. There were fourteen in the colony, and the care they received proved not merely the economics of co-operation but also its morals; our children lived a social life and learned to respect the rights of others, which does not always happen in an individual home. There was a good-sized theater in the building, and this became the children’s separate world. They did most of their own work and enjoyed it; they had their meals in a dining room of their own, with chairs and tables that fitted them, food that agreed with them and was served at proper hours. Now and then they assembled in a children’s parliament and discussed their problems, deciding what was right and what wrong for them. There was a story of a three-year-old popping up with “All in favor say aye!”

There was one full-time employee in this children’s department, the rest of the time being contributed by the various mothers at an agreed rate of compensation. Many persons had laughed at the idea that mothers could co-operate in the care of children, but as a matter of fact our mothers did it without serious trouble. There were different ideas; we had some believers in “libertarian” education, but when it came to the actual working out of theories from day to day, we found that everyone wanted the children to have no more freedom than was consistent with the happiness and peace of others.

I recall only one parent who was permanently dissatisfied. This was a completely respectable and antisocialistic lady from Tennessee, the wife of a surgeon, who was sure that her darlings had to have hot bread every day. So she exercised her right to take them to an individual home. She also took her husband, and the husband, in departing, tried to take our dining room maid as his mistress, but without success. This, needless to say, occasioned sarcastic remarks among our colonists as to socialist versus capitalist “free love.”

It was generally taken for granted among the newspapermen of New York that the purpose for which I had started this colony was to have plenty of mistresses handy. They wrote us up on that basis--not in plain words, for that would have been libel--but by innuendo easily understood. So it was with our socialist colony as with the old-time New England colonies--there were Indians hiding in the bushes, seeking to pierce us with sharp arrows of wit. Reporters came in disguise, and went off and wrote false reports; others came as guests, and went off and ridiculed us because we had beans for lunch.

I do not know of any assemblage of forty adult persons where a higher standard of sexual morals prevailed than at Helicon Hall. Our colonists were for the most part young literary couples who had one or two children and did not know how to fit them into the literary life; in short, they were persons with the same problem as myself. Professor W. P. Montague, of Columbia, had two boys, and his wife was studying to be a doctor of medicine. Maybe, as the old-fashioned moralists argued, she ought to have stayed at home and taken care of her children; but the fact was that she wouldn’t, and found it better to leave the children in care of her fellow colonists than with an ignorant servant.

But it was hard on Montague when persons came as guests, attended our Saturday-night dances, and went off and described him dancing with the dining-room girl. It happened that this was a perfectly respectable girl from Ireland who had been a servant at our farm for a year or two; she was quiet and friendly and liked by everybody. Since none of the colony workers were treated as social inferiors, Minnie danced with everybody else and had a good time; but it didn’t look so harmless in the New York gutter press, and when Montague went to Barnard to lecture the young ladies on philosophy, he was conscious of stern watchfulness on the part of the lady dean of that exclusive institution. Minnie, now many times a grandmother, lives in Berkeley, California, and writes to me now and then.

Montague came to us innocent of social theories and even of knowledge. But presently he found himself backed up against our four-sided fireplace, assailed by ferocious bands of socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, and single taxers. We could not discover that we made any dent in his armor; but presently came rumors that in the Faculty Club of Columbia, where he ate his lunch, he was being denounced as a “red” and finding himself backed up against the wall by ferocious bands of Republicans, Democrats, and Goo-goos (members of the Good Government League). Of course the palest pink in Helicon Hall would have seemed flaming red in Columbia.

IV

There were Professor William Noyes, of Teacher’s College, and his wife, Anna, who afterward conducted a private school. There were Edwin Björkman, critic, and translator of Strindberg, and his wife, Frances Maule, a suffrage worker. There were Alice MacGowan and Grace MacGowan Cooke, novelists. There was Michael Williams, a young writer, who became editor of the _Commonweal_, the Catholic weekly. I count a total of a dozen colonists who were, or afterward became, well-known writers.

There came to tend our furnaces and do odd jobs two runaway students from Yale named Sinclair Lewis and Allan Updegraff; we educated them a lot better than Yale would have done you may be sure. “Hal” and “Up” both wrote novels, but Up was better known as a poet. Hal became the most successful novelist of his time. When he came to Helicon Hall, he was very young, eager, bursting with energy and hope. He later married my secretary at the colony, Edith Summers, a golden-haired and shrewdly observant young person whose gentle voice and unassuming ways gave us no idea of her talent. She eventually became Mrs. Edith Summers Kelly, author of the novel _Weeds_; and after the tumult and shouting have died, this is one of the books that students will be told to read as they are now told to read _Evangeline_ and _Hermonn and Dorothea_. I corresponded with Hal Lewis to the end of his life, but I saw him only once in his later years--sad ones, ruined by alcohol.

We had a rule among our busy workers that nobody came to any other person’s room except by invitation; so everyone had all the privacy he wanted. When your work was done, and you felt like conversation, there was always someone by the four-sided fireplace or in the billiard room. In the evenings there were visitors, interesting persons from many parts of the world. John Dewey came occasionally, as the guest of Montague. Dewey was perhaps the best-known professor at Columbia in my time, and he exercised tremendous influence upon American education, though his ideas have often been misunderstood to the point of caricature. Personally, he was a most kind and gracious gentleman. Another visitor was William James, who was perhaps the greatest of American psychologists and certainly the ablest of that time. He was open-minded and eager in the investigation of psychic phenomena, and I remember vividly sitting with him at a table watching an old lady with a ouija board. I had never seen this object before, but the old lady held it for a good and trusted friend. She held a pencil or pen in her hand and went into a sort of trance, while some force moved her hand over the board from letter to letter. In Dewey’s presence her hand moved and spelled out the sentence “Providence child has been carried to bed.” We took this sentence to our faithful member named Randall, who owned a small business in Providence, Rhode Island, and had a wife and child there. He went to the telephone immediately and was told that the child was ill with pneumonia.

Another guest I remember was John Coryell, an anarchist, who earned his living in the strangest way--he was Bertha M. Clay, author of the sentimental romances that all servant maids then read, and may still read. Sadakichi Hartmann, the art critic came and was one of the few who were not welcome; he sent a postcard in advance, “Sadakichi Hartmann will arrive at six P.M.” and there he was, on time, but unfortunately drunk, and his companion, Jo Davidson, the sculptor, was not able to control him. When the time came for departure, he didn’t want to depart but insisted on sleeping on the cushioned seats in front of our fireplace. We had to turn him out in the snow, and the next day he wrote a letter to the papers about us, and there was quite a furor.

During these months at the colony I wrote _The Industrial Republic_, a prophecy of socialism in America. I have never reprinted this book because of the embarrassing fact that I had prophesied Hearst as a radical president of the United States. He really looked like a radical then, and I was too naïve to imagine the depths of his cynicism and depravity. When in the effort to become governor of New York he made a deal with Tom Murphy, the boss of Tammany, whom he had previously cartooned in prison stripes, I wanted to tear up my book. Incidentally, I had prophesied socialism in America in the year 1913; instead we had two world wars and the Russian Revolution--and I fear that more world wars and more revolutions stand between us and a truly democratic and free society. The world is even worse than I was able to realize; but I still cling to my faith in the methods of democracy.

V

The Helicon Home Colony came to an end abruptly, at three o’clock on a Sunday morning. The first warning I received of its doom was a sound as of enormous hammers smashing in the doors of the building. I was told afterward that it was super-heated air in plastered walls, blowing out sections of the walls. I smelled smoke and leaped out of bed.

My sleeping room was in a tower, and I had to go down a ladder to my study below; there was a door, leading to a balcony, which ran all the way around the inside of a court, three stories above the ground. I opened the door, and a mass of black smoke hit me--it seemed really solid, with heavy black flakes of soot. I shouted fire, and ran out on the balcony and up to the front, where there was a studio made over into sleeping quarters for eight or ten of our colony workers. I ran through this place, shouting to awaken the sleepers, but got no response; apparently everybody had got out--without stopping to warn me! The next day, I learned that one man had been left behind--a stranger who had been working for us as a carpenter; he had been drinking the night before and paid for it with his life.

When I came back from the studio to the balcony, the flames were sweeping over it in a furious blast. If I live to be a hundred, I shall never forget that sensation; it was like a demon hand sweeping over me--it took all the hair from one side of my head and a part of my nightshirt. I escaped by crouching against the wall, stooping low, and running fast. Fortunately the stairs were not yet in flames, so I got down into the central court, which was full of broken glass and burning brands, not very kind to my bare feet. I ran to the children’s quarters and made sure they were all out; then I ran outside, and tried to stop the fall of two ladies who had to jump from windows of the second story. Harder to stop the fall of human bodies than I would have imagined!

We stood in the snow and watched our beautiful utopia flame and roar, until it crashed in and died away to a dull glow. Then we went into the homes of our fashionable neighbors, who hadn’t known quite what to make of us in our success but were kind to us in our failure. They fitted us out with their old clothes--for hardly anyone had saved a stitch. I had the soles of my feet cleaned out by a surgeon, and was driven to New York to stay with my friends, the Wilshires, for a couple of days. An odd sensation, to realize that you do not own even a comb or a tooth-brush--only half a nightshirt! Some manuscripts were in the hands of publishers, so I was more fortunate than others of my friends.

Two or three days later I was driven back to Englewood to attend, on crutches, the sessions of the coroner’s jury. So I learned what the outside world had been thinking about our little utopia. They not only thought it a “free-love nest,” but the village horse doctor on the jury thought we had set fire to it ourselves, to get the insurance. Also, and worse yet, they thought we had arranged our affairs in such a way that we could beat the local tradesmen out of the money we owed them. It was a matter for suspicion that we had got ropes, to serve as fire escapes, shortly before the fire; they blamed us for this, and at the same time they blamed us because we had made insufficient preparations--although they had made no objection to the same conditions existing in a boys’ school for many years. In short, we did not please them in any way, and everything they said or insinuated went on to the front pages of the yellow newspapers of the country.

Every dollar of the debts of the Helicon Home Colony was paid as soon as my feet got well, which was in a week or two. Likewise all those persons who were left destitute were aided. I bought myself new clothes and looked around to decide what to do next. If I had had the cash on hand, I would have started the rebuilding of Helicon Hall at once; but we had long negotiations with insurance companies before us, and in the meantime I wanted to write another novel. I took my family to Point Pleasant, New Jersey, rented a little cottage, and went back to the single-family mode of life. It was like leaving modern civilization and returning to the dark ages. I felt that way about it for a long time, and made efforts at another colony in spite of a constantly increasing load of handicaps.

VI

We employed an honest lawyer and made an honest statement of the value of our property. The insurance companies then cut it by one third and told us that if we were not satisfied, we could sue, which would mean waiting several years for our money. I learned too late that this is their regular practice; to meet it, you double the value of your claim. You must have a _dis_honest lawyer.

We could not afford to wait, for many persons were in distress, and I was unwilling to see them suffer even though they had no legal claim upon me or the company. We settled the insurance matters and sold the land for what it would bring; after the mortgage holders were paid, I had a few thousand dollars left from the thirty thousand _The Jungle_ had earned. My friend Wilshire was in trouble with his gold mine just then, and as he had loaned me money several times, I now loaned some to him; that is, I invested it in his mine, and he wrote me a letter agreeing to return it on demand. But his affairs thereafter were in such shape that I never did demand it. And that was the end of my first “fortune.”

However, I did not worry; I was going to make another at once--so I thought. Having portrayed the workers of America and how they lived, I was now going to the opposite end of the scale--to portray the rich, and how they lived. There had come many invitations to meet these rich; there were intelligent ones among them, like “Robbie” Collier, Mrs. “Clarrie” Mackay, and Mrs. “Ollie” Belmont; there were some who were moved by curiosity and boredom, and some even with a touch of mischief. The suggestion that I should write _The Metropolis_ came first from a lady whose social position was impregnable; she offered me help and kept her promise, and all I had to do in return was to promise never to mention her name.

I refer to this matter because, in the storm of denouncement that greeted _The Metropolis_, the critics declared that it was less easy to find out about “society” than about the stockyards. But the truth is that I had not the slightest trouble in going among New York’s smart set at this time. Many authors had stepped up the golden ladder, and my feet were on it. My radical talk didn’t hurt me seriously; it was a novelty, and the rich--especially the young ones--object to nothing but boredom. Also there are some of the rich who have social consciences, and are aware that they have not earned what they are consuming. You will meet a number of such persons in the course of this story.

The reason why _The Metropolis_ is a poor book is not that I did not have the material but that I had too much. Also, I wrote it in a hurry, under most unhappy circumstances. The career of a novelist is enough for one man, and founding colonies and starting reform organizations and conducting political campaigns had better be left to persons of tougher fiber. It took me thirty years to learn that lesson thoroughly; meantime I lost the reading public that _The Jungle_ had brought me.

I did my writing about smart society in a shack that had walls full of bedbugs. I made cyanogen gas, a procedure almost as perilous to me as to the bugs. I worked through the spring and summer, and when the New York _Herald_ offered me my own price to make another investigation of the stockyards, I resisted the temptation and turned the job over to Ella Reeve Bloor. The result was a great story “killed,” as I have previously mentioned.

I was having my customary indigestion and headaches, the symptoms of overwork that I would not heed. Also, in the middle of the summer, Corydon suffered an attack of appendicitis that very nearly ended the troubles between us. A country doctor diagnosed her illness as menstrual, and when, after several days, I called a surgeon from New York, he said it was too late to operate. So there lay my youthful dream of happiness, at the gates of death for a week or two. I had then an experience that taught me something about the powers of suggestion, which are so close to magical; I saved Corydon’s life, and she knew it, and told me so afterward.

I literally pulled her back through those gates of death. She was lying in a semistupor, completely worn out by pain that had lasted more than a week; she had given up, when she heard my voice. I did not pray for her--I did not know how to do that--but I prayed to her, urging her to live, to keep holding on; and that voice came to her as something commanding, stirring new energies in her soul. When modern psychotherapists state that we die because we want to die, I understand exactly what they mean.

Corydon was taken to the Battle Creek Sanitarium to recuperate, accompanied by her mother and an elderly surgeon friend. How easy it is for human beings to accumulate needs! Four summers back Corydon and Thyrsis had lived with their baby in a tent in the woods and had thought themselves fortunate to have an income of thirty dollars a month assured them; but now Corydon needed sixty dollars a week to stay at a leisure-class health resort, and half as much for her mother’s board, and a private physician into the bargain. The child had to have a nursemaid, and a relative to take care of him in the Point Pleasant cottage; while the father had to flee to the Adirondack wilderness to get away from the worry and strain of it all! Such is success in America, the land of unlimited possibilities.

VII

To one of the most remote lakes in the Adirondacks I portaged a canoe, found a deserted open camp, stowed my duffle, and set to work to finish _The Metropolis_. My only companions were bluejays and squirrels by day, and a large stout porcupine by night. I lived on rice, beans, prunes, bacon, and fish--no fresh fruit or vegetables--and wondered why I suffered from constipation and headaches. I was beginning to grope around in the field of diet reform and decided that beans, rice, and prunes were not the solution to my problem!

To the lake came a party of young people, a dozen of them, evidently wealthy, with guides and expensive paraphernalia. They had a campfire down the shore and sang songs at night, and the lonely writer would paddle by and listen in the darkness, and think about his sick wife, who also sang. Then one afternoon several of the young men came calling; one of the party had got into a bee’s nest and was badly stung. Did I have anything to help? They invited me to join them at their campfire. I did so, and met a jolly party, and chatted with several pretty girls. One of them, sitting next to me, asked what I did, and I admitted that I wrote books. That always interests people; they think it is romantic to be a writer--not knowing about the constipation and the headaches.

I always tried to avoid giving my name, because I had come to know all possible things that people would say to the author of _The Jungle_. But these people asked the name, and when I gave it, I became aware of some kind of situation; there was laughing and teasing, and finally I learned what I had blundered into--the girl at my side was a daughter of the head of J. Ogden Armour’s legal staff!

We fought our battles over again, and I learned, either from this girl or from someone in the party, that Mr. Armour had been shut up with his lawyers for the greater part of three days and nights, insisting upon having me indicted for criminal libel, and hearing the lawyers argue that he could not “stand the gaff.” I suppose that must have happened in more than one office since I started my attack on American big business. The secret is this: you must be sure that the criminal has committed worse crimes than the ones you reveal. I have been sued for libel only once in my life, and that was when an eccentric lady pacifist named Rosika Schwimmer took exception to my playful account of her activities; this incident I will tell about later.

_The Metropolis_ was done, and the manuscript shipped off to Doubleday, Page and Company. Meantime I went over into Keene Valley and paid a visit of a week or two to Prestonia Mann Martin, wealthy utopian, who for many years had turned her Adirondack camp into a place of summer discussions--incidentally making her guests practice co-operation in kitchen and laundry. Her husband was an Englishman, one of the founders of the Fabian Society. When I met them, they were both on the way toward reaction; Prestonia was writing a book to prove that we had made no progress in civilization since the Greeks.

Both she and her husband became good, old-fashioned tories; the last time I met him was just before World War I, and we got into an argument over the results to be expected from woman suffrage. “Anyhow,” said he, “it’s not worth bothering about, because neither you nor I will ever see it.” I offered to wager that he would see it in New York State within ten years, and John Martin thought that was the funniest idea he had ever heard. But he saw it in about five years.

At this camp was James Graham Stokes, then president of our Intercollegiate Socialist Society. World War I came, and he began drilling a regiment in one of the New York armories, preparing to kill any of his former comrades who might attempt an uprising. His wife, Rose Pastor, at one time a cigar worker in New York, had tried with gentle patience to fit herself into the leisure-class world. When the war came, she gave it up and became a Bolshevik, and her marriage went to wreck.

Also at the camp was Harriet Stanton Blatch, suffragist, and Edward E. Slosson, whom I had met as one of the editors of the _Independent_. He became a well-known popularizer of science and started the Science Service. We had much to argue about.

VIII

Doubleday, Page and Company declined _The Metropolis_. They said it wasn’t a novel at all and urged me to take a year to rewrite it. I had further sessions with Walter H. Page and observed that amiable gentleman again believing what other people told him. The bright young men in his business office were certain that New York society wasn’t as bad as I portrayed it; when I told them what I knew, I observed a certain chill. I attributed it to the fact that their magazine, the _World’s Work_, was edited and published in New York, and its revenue came from the advertising of banks and trust companies that I exposed in my book. It was one thing to tell about graft in Chicago, a thousand miles away, and another to tell about it in one’s own financial family. Doubleday, Page had made a fortune out of _The Jungle_ and used it to become rich and reactionary. I bade them a sad farewell.

The _American Magazine_, then owned and run by reformers, read the manuscript and agreed to feature parts of it as a serial. I left the

## book manuscript with Moffat, Yard and Company, and went out to join my

wife at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. I stayed there for three weeks or so and tried their cure. I listened to Dr. W. K. Kellogg set forth the horrors of a carnivorous diet, and as a result I tried vegetarianism for the next three years. I felt better while I was taking treatments at the “San,” so I thought I had solved my problem of how to overwork with impunity.

Michael Williams, one of our Helicon Hall colonists, now out of a job, came out to the “San” to write it up for some magazine, and he and I saw a great deal of each other at this time. Mike was a Canadian of Welsh descent who had had a hard life, beginning as porter in a big department store, and contracting both tuberculosis and the drink habit. He had cured himself of the latter and was trying to cure himself of the former by Battle Creek methods. Incidentally, he was an ardent socialist, and a writer of no little talent; I thought he would serve the cause and was glad to help him. We devised a brilliant scheme for a vacation and a

## book combined; we would get a couple of covered wagons and take our two

families across the continent on a tour, living the outdoor life and seeing America close at hand. A “literary caravan” we would call it, “Utopia on the Trek.” The _American Magazine_ fell violently for the idea and promised to make a serial out of our adventures.

But that was a summer plan, and it was now November. We decided to take our families to Bermuda for the winter, and there write a book about our health experiences. Moffat, Yard were very keen about _The Metropolis_ and its prospects; I, remembering the advice of my newspaper friend that I should “learn to charge,” extracted an advance of five thousand dollars on royalty account. So the path of life stretched rosy before Mike and me. We would have a two-family utopia amid the coral reefs of Bermuda; I would pay the bills, and Mike would repay me out of his future earnings. “It will be a debt of honor,” he said, proudly, and repeated it every now and then.

We went to New York, the first stage of our journey, just in the wake of a great event. Wall Street had been in the midst of a frenzy of speculation, but “somebody asked for a dollar,” and there was the panic of 1907. I have told in _The Brass Check_ the peculiar circumstances under which I came to get the inside story of this event. Suffice it here to say that I had the biggest news story ever sprung in America, certainly at any rate in my time. I was able not merely to charge but to prove that the elder Morgan had deliberately brought on that panic as a means of putting the independent trust companies out of business. The _American Magazine_ editors wanted the story and signed a contract for it, but in the course of two or three weeks they got cold feet and begged me to let them off, which I did.

IX

Behold Mike and me in a fairyland set with jewels, in the remotest part of the Bermudas, far from the maddening crowd of tourists. The house is white limestone, set upon a rocky shore overlooking a little bay, behind which the sun sets every evening. Out on a point in front of us stands an old ruin of a mansion, deserted, but having a marvelous mahogany staircase inside so that we can assure the children it was once the home of a pirate chief. The water is brilliant azure, shading to emerald in the shallows; over it flies the man-o’-war bird, snow-white, with a long white feather trailing like a pennant. The sun shines nearly always. There is a tennis court, surrounded by a towering hedge of oleanders in perpetual blossom. There are roses, and a garden in which a colored boy raises our vegetarian vegetables. The house is wide and rambling, with enough verandas so that both halves of this two-family utopia can sleep outdoors.

Mike is working on his autobiographical novel--it was published under the title of _The High Romance_. I am writing _The Millennium_, a play, and we write our health book together--I won’t tell you the name of that, having changed my ideas to some extent. I have brought a secretary with me, and Mike has half her time, the salary being added to that “debt of honor” of which we keep a careful account. There is a Swedish governess who takes care of my son and the two Williams children impartially; also Mike’s wife has an elderly friend to assist her. There is Minnie to do the housework for all of us--Irish Minnie who danced with the college professors at Helicon Hall. Our utopia contains a total of twelve persons, and my five thousand dollars exactly suffices for the fares and the six months’ expenses.

Then _The Metropolis_ is published and sells eighteen thousand copies, barely justifying the advance; so there are no more royalties, and I am stuck in a strange land, without money to get the family home! Mike volunteers to go to New York and find a publisher for the health book, our common property; he will get an advance and remit me half. He goes, and places the book with the Frederick A. Stokes Company; he collects an advance and puts it all into his own pocket--and I am stuck again!

I borrow money from somebody and come home. Mike and his family go to California, and he takes up his old drinking habits and gets another hemorrhage; the next thing I hear, he has sought refuge in the religion of his childhood. He told all that in _The High Romance_; Saint Theresa came to him, and proved her presence by making him smell a rose as he was walking down the street. That was a miracle, and by it Mike knew he was one of the elect. That any hypnotist could have worked a hundred such miracles--could have caused Mike to smell all the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la-la--that had nothing to do with the case.

X

So ended my attempt to raise up and train a new socialist writer. It is an ugly story to tell on a man--the only mean story in this amiable book, you may note. Nothing could hire me to tell it--except for a later development, which you have still to hear.

Ten years passed, and Mike was all but forgotten. I started a magazine and in it published _The Profits of Religion_, dealing with the churches by the method of economic interpretation. Mike, being now a champion of Roman Catholicism--his publishers were introducing him as “one of the most influential lay Catholics of America”--sallied forth to destroy my book. That was all right; I grant every man a right to disagree with me--the more the merrier, it is all advertising. But Mike found his task difficult, for the reason that my statements in _The Profits of Religion_ are derived from Catholic sources--devotional works, papal decrees, pastoral letters, editorials in church papers--everything with the holy imprimatur, _nihil obstat_.

So, instead of attacking the book, Mike chose to attack its author. He accused me of being a writer for gain, and headed his review with the title “A Prophet for Profit”! I have heard that charge many times, but it did seem to me there was one person in America who was barred from making it--and that was my old friend and pensioner, Michael Williams. Since he made it, and published it, it seems to me that the consequences are upon his own head. And that is why I tell the story here. I never saw him again, and never will--for he is dead.

XI

The satiric comedy _The Millennium_, which I had in my suitcase, made a hit with the leading stage impresario of that time, David Belasco. He agreed to produce it on an elaborate scale in the course of the coming winter. He was fighting the “trust” and had two big theaters in New York, where he put on two big productions every year. But after keeping me waiting for a year, and making many promises, he suddenly made peace with his enemies; he then wanted small shows that could be put on the road, so he threw over _The Millennium_ and produced _The Easiest Way_, by Eugene Walter, which had only eight characters. So vanished one more of those dreams that haunted me for ten years or more--earning a lot of money and starting another colony.

I got an advance from a publisher, and took my family to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks, rented a little camp, and settled down to the task of weaving into a novel my story of how the elder J. P. Morgan had caused the panic of the previous autumn. _The Moneychangers_ was the title. It was to be a sequel to _The Metropolis_. I was planning a trilogy to replace the one that had died with _Manassas_. My plans were still grandiloquent.

When I was gathering material for the book, Lincoln Steffens introduced me to two of my most valuable informants: Samuel Untermyer and James B. Dill. Dill had been the most highly paid corporation lawyer in Wall Street, and had recently been appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in New Jersey. So he was free and could talk; and the stories he told me you wouldn’t believe. I will tell only one. He took me out to his home in New Jersey to spend the night, and when we came into the dining room, he said, “Make a note of this table and that window with the double French doors, I will tell you a story about them.”

This was the story. There was a lawsuit involving several million dollars, and Dill came into possession of a document that would decide the case. He wanted to make certain that this document could not be stolen. He was certain that a desperate attempt would be made to steal it, so he put two or three typists to work all day, and they made a total of twenty-one copies; he sent his office employees out to rent safe-deposit boxes in various banks in and around Wall Street. He sealed the copies in twenty-one envelopes, and one of them contained the original document. He alone knew which bank got the original. He took one of the copies out to his home that evening and said to his butler, “The house will be burglarized tonight, but don’t pay any attention to it. I want them to get what they come for.”

He set the sealed envelope on the corner of his dining-room table; sure enough, the next morning he found that the French windows had been opened and the envelope taken.

When he reached his office in the morning he called up the firm of the other side in the case and said, “By now you know what we have; our terms are two and one-half million dollars”--or whatever the amount was--and they settled on that basis. I used the story in one of my novels and, of course, everybody said it was preposterous; but it was told to me by James B. Dill.

_The Moneychangers_ did not come up to my hopes, mainly because of the unhappy situation in which I was living. My health made continuous application impossible. I beg the reader’s pardon for referring to these matters, but they are a factor in the lives of authors. I am fortunate in being able to promise a happy ending to the story--I mean that I have solved the problem of doing my work and keeping entirely well. I will tell the secrets in due course--so read on!

For recreation I climbed the mountains, played tennis, and swam in the lake. I slept in an open camp under the pine trees and conformed to all the health laws I knew. We had Irish Minnie with us, and also a woman friend of Corydon’s, a young student whom she had met at Battle Creek, very religious, a Seventh-day Adventist. Corydon was trying various kinds of mental healing, and I was hoping for anything to keep her happy while I went on solving the problems of the world.

For myself I had good company that summer; a man whom I had met two years before, at the time _The Jungle_ was published. An Englishman twelve years older than I, he had come to New York and sent me a letter of introduction from Lady Warwick, our socialist countess. H. G. Wells was the traveler’s name, and I had been obliged to tell him that I had never heard of him. He sent me his _Modern Utopia_, inscribing it charmingly, “To the most hopeful of Socialists, from the next most hopeful.” I found it a peerless book, and wrote him a letter that he accepted as “a coronation.” I had him with me that summer in the Adirondacks by the magic of eight or ten of his early romances, the most delightful books ever made for a vacation. _Thirty Strange Stories_ was one title, and I smiled patronizingly, saying that a man could write one strange story or maybe half a dozen--but thirty! Yet there they were, and every one was strange, and I knew that I had met a great imaginative talent. Since then I have heard the highbrow critics belittle H. G. Wells; but I know that with Bernard Shaw he constituted a major period in British letters.

_The Moneychangers_ was published, and my revelations made a sensation for a week or two. The book sold about as well as _The Metropolis_, so I was ahead again--just long enough to write another book. But it seemed as if my writing days were at an end; I was close to a nervous breakdown, and had to get away from a most unhappy domestic situation and take a complete rest. Corydon wanted to have an apartment of her own in New York, and solve her own problems. My friend Gaylord Wilshire now had a gold mine, high up in the eastern slope of the Sierra mountains; also George Sterling, the poet, was begging me to come to Carmel and visit him; so I set out over the pathway of the argonauts in a Pullman car.

_7_

_Wandering_

I

It was my first trip across the American continent; and I stopped first in Chicago, to visit the stockyards after four years. There was a big hall, and a cheering crowd--the socialists having got up a mass meeting. In front of the platform sat a row of newspaper reporters, and I told them of the New York _Herald_’s investigation of conditions in the presumably reformed yards. The investigation had been made a year before, and nothing about it had appeared in the Chicago press. A good story, was it not?--I asked the reporters at the press tables, and they nodded and grinned. Yes, it was a good story; but not a line about either story or meeting appeared in any capitalist paper of Chicago next morning.

The next stop was Lawrence, Kansas, to meet the coming poet of America, as I considered him. He was a student at the state university, and I had discovered his verses in the magazines and had written to him; he had sent me batches of manuscript and poured out his heart. A real genius this time--one who wrote all day and all night, in a frenzy, just as I had done. He had gone to the university a bare-footed tramp, and now slept in an attic over a stable, wrapped in a horse blanket. He was so eager to meet me that he borrowed money, bought a railroad ticket, and boarded my train a couple of hours before it reached Lawrence; we had lunch in the diner--the first time in the poet’s life, he assured me.

When we got to town, I was escorted about and shown off, and begged to talk to a group of the students and even a professor or two. It was a great hour for the “box-car poet”; I being an object of curiosity, and he being host and impresario. We went for a walk in the country, and he told me his troubles. He had never had anything to do with a woman, but here the girls flirted with him--none of them in earnest, because he was a poor devil, and poetry was a joke compared with money. Now and then he was on the verge of suicide, but he’d be damned if he’d give them that much satisfaction. Such was Harry Kemp in his far-off day of glory; I was thirty, and he twenty-five, and the future was veiled to us both. So eager was he for my time that he borrowed more money and rode another two or three hours on the train with me.

Denver, and Ben Lindsey, judge of the Children’s Court; a new idea and a new man. I watched the court at work and sat in at a session of the Judge’s friends in the YMCA. He was in the midst of one of those political fights that came every year or two, until finally the “beast” got him. He revealed to me that he had written an account of his war with the organized corruption of Denver. I took the manuscript, read it on the train, and telegraphed _Everybody’s Magazine_ about it; they sent out Harvey O’Higgins and so got another big serial, “The Beast and the Jungle.”

The book was afterward published by Doubleday, Page and Company, and withheld from circulation--the same trick they played upon Theodore Dreiser, but never upon Upton Sinclair, you can wager! If there should ever be another crop of muckrakers in America, here is a tip they will find useful: put a clause into your contract to the effect that if at any time the publisher fails to keep the book in print and sell it to all who care to buy it, the author may have the right to the use of the plates, and print and sell an edition of his own. That makes it impossible for the publisher to “sell you out”; the would-be buyer, when he reads that clause, will realize that he is buying nothing.

A day in Ogden, Utah, with a horseback ride up the canyon; and one in Reno, Nevada, walking for hours among the irrigation ditches in the hills, and then, in the evening, watching the gambling--it was a wide-open town even in those days. A curious two-faced little city, with a fine state university, and a fashionable tone set by several hundred temporary residents from the East, seeking divorces. The Catholics and the fundamentalists of America have combined to force men and women to live together when they want to part; so here were the lawyers and the politicians of this little mining town getting rich, by selling deliverance to the lucky few who could afford a few weeks’ holiday. Corydon was talking of joining this divorce colony, so I looked the ground over with personal interest.

II

A day’s journey on the little railroad that runs behind the Sierras, through the red deserts of Nevada. In the little town of Bishop, California, the Wilshires met me, and we rode saddle horses up to the mine, eighteen miles in the mountains. A high valley with Bishop Creek running through, towering peaks all about, and cold, clear lakes--the first snows of the year were falling, and trout had quit biting, but I climbed the peaks, and ate large meals in the dining room with the miners. The camp was run on a basis of comradeship, with high wages and plenty of socialist propaganda; we slept in a rough shack and in the evenings discussed the mine with the superintendent and foreman and assayer. These were old-time mining men, and they were of one accord that here was the greatest gold mine in America. You could see the vein, all the way up the mountainside, and down in the workings you could knock pieces off the face and bring them up and have them assayed before your eyes.

But alas, there were complications in quartz mining beyond my understanding. Most of the vein was low-grade, and it could only be made to pay if worked on a large scale. Wilshire did not have the capital to work it in that way, and in the effort to get the money, he bled himself and thousands of readers of his magazine who had been brought to share his rosy hopes. I stood by him through that long ordeal, and know that he did everything--except to turn the mine over to some of the big capitalist groups that sought to buy it and freeze out the old stockholders. Ultimately, of course, the big fellows got it.

Socialists ought not to fool with money-making schemes in capitalist society. I have heard that said a hundred times, and I guess it is right; but there is something to be noted on the other side. The socialists of America have never been able to maintain an organ of propaganda upon a national scale; the country is too big, and the amount of capital required is beyond their resources. The _Appeal to Reason_ was a gift to them from a real-estate speculator with a conscience, old J. A. Wayland--may the managers of the next world be pitiful to him. (His enemies set a trap for him, baited with a woman; he crossed a state line in her company, which is a prison offense in our pious America, and when he got caught, he blew out his brains.) _Wilshire’s Magazine_ was a gift from a billboard advertising man with a sense of humor. So long as his money lasted, we all took his gift with thanks; if his gold-mining gamble had succeeded, we would all have made money, and had a still bigger magazine, and everything would have been lovely. But my old friend Gay died in a hospital in New York, all crippled up with arthritis. I missed his fertile mind and his sly, quiet smile.

III

On to Carmel, a town that boasts more scenery to the square mile than any other place I know; a broad beach, bordered by deep pine woods and flanked by rocky headlands; at one side a valley, with farms, a river running through it and mountains beyond. Fifty years ago the place was owned by a real-estate speculator of the Bohemian Club type; that is to say, a person with the art bug who would donate a lot to any celebrity who would confer the honor of his presence. Needless to say, George Sterling, the Bohemian Club’s poet laureate, had his pick of lots, and a bungalow on a little knoll by the edge of a wood remote from traffic and “boosting.”

George was at this time forty, but showed no signs of age. He was tall and spare, built like an Indian, with a face whose resemblance to Dante had often been noted. When he was with the roistering San Francisco crew he drank, but when he was alone he lived the life of an athlete in training; he cut wood, hunted, walked miles in the mountains, and swam miles in the sea. A charming companion, tenderhearted as a child, bitter only against cruelty and greed; incidentally a fastidious poet, aloof and dedicated.

His friend Arnold Genthe gave me the use of a cottage, and there I lived alone for two or three months of winter, in peace and happiness unknown to me for a long time. I had been reading the literature of the health cranks, and had resolved upon a drastic experiment; I would try the raw-food diet, for which so much was promised. I ate two meals a day, of nuts, fruits, olives, and salad vegetables; the only cooked food being two or three shredded-wheat biscuits or some graham crackers. The diet agreed with me marvelously, and for the entire period I never had an ache or pain. So I was triumphant, entirely overlooking the fact that I was doing none of the nerve-destroying labor of creative writing. I was reading, walking, riding horseback, playing tennis, meeting with George and other friends; if I had done that all my life I might never have had an ache or pain.

In Oakland was the Ruskin Club, an organization of socialist intellectuals, who wanted to give a dinner and hear me make a speech. George and I went up to town, and George stopped in the Bohemian Club, and stood in front of the bar with his boon companions; I stood with him and drank a glass of orange juice, as is my custom. Then we set out for the ferry, George talking rapidly, and I listening in a strange state of uncertainty. I couldn’t understand what George was saying, and I couldn’t understand why. It wasn’t until we got to Oakland that I realized what was the matter; my California Dante was drunk. When we got to the dinner, someone who knew him better than I took him off and walked him around the block and fed him bromo-seltzers; the socialist poem he had written for the occasion had to be read by someone else.

I went back to Carmel alone, feeling most sorrowful. I was used to my poor old father getting drunk, and some of my other men relatives, but this was the first time I had ever seen a great mind distorted by alcohol. I wrote George a note, telling him that I was leaving Carmel because I could not be happy there. George came running over to my place at once, and with tears in his eyes pleaded forgiveness. He swore that he had had only two drinks; it was because he had taken them on an empty stomach. But I knew that sort of drinker’s talk, and it did not move me. Then he swore that if I would stay, he would not touch another drop while I was in California. That promise I accepted, and he kept it religiously. Many a time I have thought my best service to letters might have been to stay right there the rest of my days!

That Ruskin Club dinner was a quaint affair. Frederick Irons Bamford, assistant librarian of the Oakland Public Library, had organized the group and ran it with a firm hand. I think he must have been a Sunday-school superintendent before he came into the socialist movement; he shepherded the guests in just that way, telling us exactly what to do at each stage, and we did it with good-natured laughter. There were songs printed for us to sing, each at the proper moment; there were speeches, poems, announcements in due order. “And now,” said our shepherd, “we will have ten minutes of humor. Will some one kindly tell a funny story?”

A man arose, and said, “I will tell you a story that nobody can understand.” The two or three hundred banqueters pricked up their ears, of course, and prepared to meet the challenge. I have tried out this “story that nobody can understand” on several audiences, and it always “goes,” so I give you a chance at it. Said the man at the banquet: “I wish to explain that this is not one of those silly jokes where you look for a point but there is no point. This is a really funny story, and you would laugh heartily if you could understand it, but you can’t. I will ask you, if you are able to see the point, to raise your hand, so that we can count you.” He told the story, and a silence followed; all the people craned their necks to see if there was any hand up. Finally several did go up, I forget how many. We all had a good laugh, and it was really ten minutes of humor. The story was as follows:

Mrs. Jones goes into her grocer’s and asks for a dozen boxes of matches. Says the grocer: “Why, Mrs. Jones, you had a dozen boxes of matches yesterday!” Says Mrs. Jones: “Oh, yes, but you see, my husband is deaf and dumb, and he talks in his sleep.”

Raise your hand!

IV

Tramping the hills and forests and beaches of Carmel, riding horseback over the Seventeen Mile Drive, there began to haunt my brain a vision of a blank-verse tragedy; the story of a child of the coal mines who is adopted by rich people and educated, and finally becomes a leader of social revolution. The first act was set in the depths of the mine, a meeting between the rich child and the poor one, a fairy scene haunted by the weird creatures who people the mine boy’s fancy as he sits all day in the darkness, opening and closing a door to let the muleteams through. The second act was to happen in utopia, being the young hero’s vision of a world in which he played the part of a spiritual leader. The third act was in the drawing room of a Fifth Avenue mansion, whose windows looked out upon the street where the hero leads the mob to his own death.

The verses of this to me marvelous drama would come rolling through my mind like breakers on the Carmel strand; but in the interest of health I put off writing them, and soon they were gone forever. I suppose it is natural that I should think of this drama as the greatest thing I ever had hold of--on the principle that the biggest fish is the one that got away. Curiously enough, the main feature of the second act was to be an invention whereby the hero was to be heard by the whole world at once. Such was my concept of utopia; and now, more than half a century later, the people of my home town sit all evening and listen to the wonders of the Hair-Again Hair Restorer, and the bargains in Two-Pants Suits at Toots, the Friendly Tailor; every now and then there is a “hookup” of a hundred or two stations, whereby all America sees and hears the batterings of two bruisers; or maybe the Jazz-Boy Babies, singing; or maybe the “message” of some politician seeking office.

My rest came to an end, because a stock company in San Francisco proposed to put on my dramatization of _Prince Hagen_, and the newspaper reporters came and wrote up my “squirrel diet” and my views on love and marriage, duly “pepped up”--though I don’t think we had that phrase yet. I thought there ought to be a socialist drama in America, and I sat down and wrote three little one-act plays, which required only three actors and no scenery at all. Feeling so serene in my new-found health, I resolved to organize a company and show how it could be done. I made a deal with the head of a school of acting to train my company, going halves with him on the profits; and for two or three weeks I had all the comrades of the Bay cities distributing handbills, announcing our world-beating dramatic sensation.

One of these plays was _The Second-Story Man_. It was later published in one of the Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books; every now and then some actor would write and tell me it was “a wonder,” and would I let him do it in vaudeville? He would get it ready, and then the masters of the circuit would say nix on that radical stuff. The second play was a conversation between “John D” and “the Author” on a California beach, having to do with socialism and John D’s part in bringing it nearer--by putting all the little fellows out of business. The third play, _The Indignant Subscriber_, told about a newspaper reader who lures the editor of his morning newspaper out in a boat in the middle of a lake, makes him listen for the first time in his life, and ends by dumping him overboard and swimming away. In production, the “boat” was made by two chairs tied at opposite ends of a board; the editor sat in one chair, and the indignant subscriber in the other, and the oars were two brooms. The comedy of rowing out into the middle of an imaginary lake while admiring the imaginary scenery was enjoyed by the audience, and when the editor was dumped overboard, a thousand social rebels whooped with delight.

The plays were given seven or eight times, and the theaters were packed; the enterprise was, dramatically speaking, a success; but, alas, I had failed to investigate the economics of my problem. The company had engagements for only two or three nights in the week, whereas the actors were getting full salaries. Distances were great, and the railway fares ate up the receipts. If I had started this undertaking in the Middle West where the company could have traveled short distances on trolley cars, and if I had done the booking in advance so as to have a full schedule, there is no doubt that we could have made a success. As it was, the adventure cost me a couple of thousand dollars.

V

Letters from Corydon informed me that our son had celebrated his winter in New York by being laid up with tonsillitis; also, Corydon herself had not found joy in freedom, and was ready to live according to her husband’s ideas for a while. David Belasco was promising to produce _The Millennium_ in the following autumn, so I telegraphed Corydon to join me in Miami, Florida. I took a train to Galveston, Texas, and from there a steamer to Key West.

My squirrel diet was difficult to obtain on trains, and perhaps I had overworked on my dramatic enterprise--anyhow, on the steamer across the Gulf of Mexico I developed a fever. I remember a hot night when it was impossible to sleep in the stateroom. I went out on deck and tossed all night in a steamer chair, having for company a member of the fashionable set of one of our big cities--I forget which, but they are all alike. A man somewhat older than I, he had just broken with his wife and was traveling in order to get away from her; he had a bottle in his pocket, and the contents of others inside him, enough to unlimber his tongue.

He told me about his quarrel with his wife, every word that she had said and every word that he had said; he told me every crime she had ever committed, and some of his own; he poured out the grief of being rich and fashionable in a big American city; he told me about the fornications and adulteries of his friends--in short, I contemplated a social delirium with my own half-delirious mind. The element of phantasmagoria that you find in some of my books may be derived from that night’s experience, in which fragments of fashionable horror wavered and jiggled before my mind, vanished and flashed back again, loomed colossal and exploded in star showers, like human faces, locomotives, airplanes, and skyscrapers in a futurist moving-picture film.

At Key West I was taken off the steamer and deposited in a private hospital, where I stayed for a week; then, somewhat tottery, I met Corydon and our son at Miami, and we found ourselves a little cottage in a remote settlement down the coast, Coconut Grove. It was April, and hot, and I basked in the sunshine; I took long walks over a white shell road that ran straight west into a flaming sunset, with a forest of tall pine trees on each side. Incidentally, I slapped innumerable deer flies on my face and hands and legs. I do not know if they call them that in Florida--maybe they don’t admit their existence; but deer fly was the name in the Adirondacks and Canada for those little flat devils, having half-black and half-white wings, and stinging you like a needle.

We went swimming in a wide, shallow bay, warm as a bathtub; you had to walk half a mile to get to deep water, and on the soft bottom lay great round black creatures that scooted away when you came near. I wondered if it would be possible to catch one, but fortunately I did not try, for they were the disagreeable sting rays or stingarees. (Having become a loyal Californian, it gives me pleasure to tell about the entomological and piscatorial perils of Florida.) The owner of a big beach-front place tried to sell it to us for five or six thousand dollars, and we talked of buying it for quite a while. I suppose that during the postwar boom the owner sold it for a million or two, and it is now the site of a twenty-story office building full of tenants.

In Coconut Grove, as in Carmel, there was a “literary colony.” I met some of them, but remember only one: a figure who walked the white shell roads with me, tall, athletic, brown, and handsome as a Greek statue--Witter Bynner, the poet. Corydon, smiling, remarked, “Bynner is a winner.” That compliment, from a qualified expert, I pass on to him, in exchange for the many fine letters he has written to me about my books. He is eighty now--and I am eighty-four.

I think it was during these six weeks that I wrote _The Machine_, the play that forms a sequel to _The Moneychangers_. An odd sort of trilogy--two novels and a play! But it was the best I could do at the time. I saw a vision of myself as a prosperous Broadway dramatist, a licensed court jester of capitalism. But the vision proved to be a mirage.

VI

For the summer of 1909 I rented a cottage on the shore at Cutchogue, near the far end of Long Island; beautiful blue water in front of us, and tall shade trees in the rear. I was carrying on with my raw-food diet, and my family also was giving it a trial. To aid and abet us we had a household assistant and secretary who was an even less usual person than myself. Dave Howatt was his name. He was fair-haired and rosy-cheeked and he nourished his great frame upon two handfuls of pecans or almonds, two dishes of soaked raw prunes, and a definite number of ripe bananas every day--it may have been a dozen or two, I cannot remember. This blond Anglo-Saxon monkey romped with my son, oversaw his upbringing, typed my letters, and washed and soaked the family prunes. A youth after my own heart--vegetarian, teetotaler, nonsmoker, pacifist, philosophical anarchist, conscientious objector to capitalism, dreamer, and practitioner of brotherhood--Dave had been at Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture City, and had known Harry Kemp since boyhood. Now Dave is living in Cuba, and at last report was loving it.

But alas for idealistic theories and hopes--the diet that had served me so marvelously on the shore of the Pacific played the dickens with me on the shore of the Atlantic. The difference was that now I was doing creative writing, putting a continuous strain upon brain and nerves, and apparently not having the energy to digest raw food. Dave Howatt, in his role of guide and mentor, thought my indigestion was due to my evil habit of including cooked breadstuff in the diet, so for a while I changed from a squirrel to a monkey. Then he thought I ate too much, so I cut the quantity in half, which reduced the size of the balloon inside me; but it left me hungry all the time, so that when I played tennis, I would have to stop in the middle and come home and get a prune.

Under these trying conditions I wrote another book, endeavoring to put the socialist argument into a simple story, which could carry it to minds that otherwise would never get it. I aimed at the elemental and naïve, something like _The Vicar of Wakefield_ or _Pilgrims Progress_. The border line between the naïve and the banal is difficult to draw, and so authorities differ about _Samuel the Seeker_. Some of my friends called it a wretched thing, and the public agreed with them. But on the other hand, Frederik van Eeden, great novelist and poet in his own language, wrote me a letter of rapture about _Samuel_, considering it my best. Robert Whitaker, pacifist clergyman who committed the crime of taking the sixth commandment literally and spent several months in a Los Angeles jail during World War I, came on a copy of the book at that time, and he also judged it a success. The publishing firm of Bauza in Barcelona, desiring to issue an edition of my novels, saw fit to lead off with _Samuel Busca la Verdad_. So perhaps in the days of the co-operative commonwealth the pedagogues will discover a new classic, suitable for required reading in high schools!

VII

By the end of the summer my health was too bad to tell about, and I had got my thoughts centered on a new remedy, a fast cure. I had been reading _Physical Culture_ magazine, and I wrote to Bernarr Macfadden, who was then running a rival institution to the Battle Creek Sanitarium. He invited me to bring my family and let him have a try at my problem.

Athlete, showman, lecturer, editor, publisher, and health experimenter--I could make B. M. the subject of an entertaining essay, but there is not space here. To the high-brows he was a symbol of the vulgarity and cheapness of America. And it won’t help for me to defend him, because I may also be on that list. I merely state what Macfadden did for me--which was to teach me, free, gratis, and for nothing, more about the true principles of keeping well and fit for my work than all the orthodox and ordained physicians who charged me many thousands of dollars for not doing it. Believe me, I went to the best there were in every field, and while some of them had mercy on a writer, others treated me like a millionaire. I number many doctors among my friends, and the better they know me, the more freely they admit the unsatisfactory state of their work. Leo Buerger, a college mate who became a leading specialist in New York, summed the situation up when I mentioned the osteopaths, and remarked that they sometimes made cures. Said my eminent friend: “They cure without diagnosing, and we diagnose without curing.”

My visit to Macfadden took place in 1909--back in the dark ages, before the words “preventive medicine” had ever been joined together. I had asked doctor after doctor to advise me how to keep well, and not one of them seemed to know what I was talking about; they attempted to cure my sickness, and then they sent me away to go on doing the things that had brought the sickness on. The secrets of natural living were the property of a little group of adventurous persons known as “health cranks”; and it has been my pleasure to watch the leading ideas of these “cranks” being rediscovered one by one by medical authority, and so made known to the newspapers and the public. It was not Dr. Auguste Rollier of Switzerland who invented the sun cure; no indeed, the semilunatics of Physical Culture City were going around in breechclouts, men and women getting themselves arrested by rural constables, before ever the word _Nacktkultur_ was imported.

The same thing is true of vitamins, and of the evils of denatured foods, and the importance of bulk in the diet--we knew all that before Sir Arbuthnot Lane ever addressed a medical congress. As to fasting, I stood the ridicule of my medical friends for twenty years, and then in the files of the _Journal of Metabolism_ I found the records of laboratory tests upon humans as well as dogs proving that the effect of a prolonged fast is a permanent increase in the metabolic rate--which is the same thing as rejuvenation, and exactly what we “health cranks” have claimed.

VIII

At Macfadden’s institution in Battle Creek were perhaps a hundred patients, faithfully trying out these eccentricities. They fasted for periods long or short; I met one man who went to fifty-five days, attempting a cure for locomotor ataxia--he was beginning to walk, in spite of all the dogmas. Later I met a man who weighed nearly three hundred pounds, who fasted over ninety days, which is the record so far as I know. This was before suffragettes and hunger strikes, and it was the accepted idea that a human being would starve to death in three or four days.

After the fast we went on a thing known as a milk diet, absorbing a glass of fresh milk every half hour, and sometimes every twenty minutes, until we had got up to eight quarts a day. The fasters sat around, pale and feeble in the sunshine, while the milk drinkers swarmed at the dairy counter, and bloomed and expanded and swapped anecdotes--it was a laboratory of ideas, and if you had a new one, no matter how queer, you could find somebody who had tried it, or was ready to try it forthwith. When you came off the milk diet, you might try some odd combination such as sour milk and dates. In the big dining room you were served every sort of vegetarian food. There were dark rumors that the smell of beefsteaks was coming from Macfadden’s private quarters. I asked him about it, and he told me he was trying another experiment.

I met him again when he was sixty; still of the same experimental disposition, he wanted to know what I had learned in twenty years. He then owned a string of magazines and newspapers, I don’t know how many, and I would not venture to imagine how many millions they brought him every year, or the number of his blooming daughters--I think there were eight in a photograph on his desk. He still had his muscles of steel, and would take two packs of cards, put them together, and tear them in half before your eyes. He had been a weakling in his youth, had built up that powerful frame, and would put on bathing trunks and come out on a platform and show it to people; very vulgar, of course--no “ethical” medico would dream of doing it. But it caused great numbers of men and women to take an interest in their health, and it set up resistance to those forces of modern civilization that were destroying the body.

My personal experience has been told in a book, _The Fasting Cure_, so I will merely say that I took a fast of ten or twelve days, and then a milk diet of three weeks, and achieved a sense of marvelous well-being. My wife did the same, and we became enthusiasts. I took a second fast of a week or so, and when I left the place I had gained about twenty pounds, which I needed. But I did not keep it, for as soon as I left the sanitarium I started on a new book.

IX

Harry Kemp came to see us in Battle Creek; he was on his way back to college after a summer’s work on the oreboats of the Great Lakes. He had a suitcase full of manuscripts, an extra shirt, and a heart bubbling over with literary excitements. He met Corydon for the first time and found her interesting; Corydon, for her part, was maternal to a forlorn poet.

The fates wove their webs, unguessed by any of us. It happened that at the Kellogg Institution, just down the street, there was a young lady from the Delta district of Mississippi--she had accompanied her mother and a cousin who were undergoing treatment. Mary Craig Kimbrough was the name of the young lady, and one day when she was walking with her cousin, the cousin remarked, “Would you like to meet an author? There goes Upton Sinclair with his wife.” Said the haughty young lady, “I don’t think he would interest me.” But the cousin insisted. “Oh, come on, I met him the other day, and he’s not so bad as he looks.”

She called the author from across the street, introductions were exchanged, and we chatted for a few minutes. The propagandist author, being just then excited over fasting, and having no manners or tact or taste or anything of that sort, informed an extremely proud young Southern belle that she was far too thin and needed a fast and a milk diet. It was the first time in her whole life that a man had ever addressed her except in the Southern mode of compliment.

I invited her and her cousin and her mother to come over to Macfadden’s that evening, where I was to give an outdoor talk. They came; and I was in a jovial mood, telling of the many queer ideas I had tried out in my search for health. The audience rocked with laughter when I set forth how, in the course of my first fast, I had walked down a hill from the institution, and then didn’t have the strength to climb back. No one was more amused than the young lady from Mississippi.

I remember that we took a walk up and down the piazza of the sanitarium, while this most sedate and dignified person--then twenty-five years of age--confided to me that she was troubled in her mind and would appreciate my advice. She revealed that she found herself unable to believe what she had been taught about the Bible. This was a source of great distress to her, and she didn’t know quite what to think of herself. Had I ever heard of anyone similarly afflicted?

I assured her with all necessary gravity that I had heard of such cases. This was a relief to her; there were few such persons in the Mississippi Delta, she declared. The development of her faithlessness had become a cause of anguish to her family; her mother would assemble the ladies of all the local churches in her drawing room, and the straying sheep would be called in and compelled to kneel down with them, while one after another they petitioned the Deity for the salvation of her soul. When they had finished, they would look at the fair sheep, and wait to see the effect of their labors; but so far the medicine had failed.

I assured the young lady that I also was a lost soul, and gave her the names of an assortment of books--T. H. Huxley’s essays among them. She duly bought them all, and when she got home, a brother discovered her reading them and took them away to his law office, where only men could be corrupted by them. He himself soon gave up his faith.

X

For the winter I took my family to the single-tax colony at Fairhope, Alabama, on Mobile Bay. Since I could not have a colony of my own, I would try other people’s. Here were two or three hundred assorted reformers who had organized their affairs according to the gospel of Henry George. They were trying to eke out a living from poor soil and felt certain they were setting an example to the rest of the world. The climate permitted the outdoor life, and we found a cottage for rent on the bay front, remote from the village. Dave Howatt was with us again; having meantime found himself a raw-food wife, he lived apart from us and came to his secretarial job daily.

I was overworking again; and when my recalcitrant stomach made too much trouble, I would fast for a day, three days, a week. I was trying the raw-food diet, and failing as before. I was now a full-fledged physical culturist, following a Spartan regime. In front of our house ran a long pier, out to the deep water of the bay. Often the boards of this pier were covered with frost, very stimulating to the bare feet, and whipped by icy winds, stimulating to the skin; each morning I made a swim in this bay a part of my law. (Says Zarathustra: “Canst thou hang thy will above thee as thy law?”)

Among the assorted philosophies expressed at Fairhope was the cult of Dr. J. H. Salisbury, meat-diet advocate; I read his book. Let me remind you again that this was before the days of any real knowledge about diet. Salisbury was one of the first regular M.D.’s who tried experiments upon himself and other human beings in order to find out how

## particular foods actually affect the human body. He assembled a “poison

squad” of healthy young men, fed them on various diets, and studied the ailments they developed. By such methods he thought to prove that excess of carbohydrates was the cause of tuberculosis in humans. His guess was wrong--yet not so far wrong as it seems. It is my belief that denatured forms of starch and sugar are the predisposing cause of the disease; people live on white flour, sugar, and lard, and when the body has become weakened, the inroads of bacteria begin.

Anyhow, Salisbury would put his “poison squad” on a diet of lean beef, chopped and lightly cooked, and cure them of their symptoms in a week or two. He had a phrase by which he described the great health error, “making a yeastpot of your stomach.” That was what I had been doing, and now, to the horror of my friend Dave Howatt, I decided to try the Salisbury system. I remember my emotions, walking up and down in front of the local butchershop and getting up the courage to enter. To my relief, I caused no sensation. Apparently the butcher took it quite as a matter of course that a man should purchase a pound of sirloin.

I had been a practicing vegetarian--and what was worse, a preaching one--for a matter of three years; and now I was a backslider. My socialist comrade, Eugene Wood, happened to be spending the winter in Fairhope, and he wrote a jolly piece about “America’s leading raw-food advocate who happens just now to be living upon a diet of stewed beefsteaks.” I had to bow my head, and add crow to my menu!

XI

In Fairhope was the Organic School, invention of Mrs. Marietta Johnson. It was then a rudimentary affair, conducted in a couple of shacks, but has since become famous. Our son, David, then eight years old, attended it. His education had been scattery, with his parents moving from a winter resort to a summer resort. But he had always had the world’s best literature and had done the rest for himself. Fairhope he found to his taste; we had a back porch and a front porch to our isolated cottage, and he would spread his quilt and pillow on the former, and I would spread mine on the latter, and sleep outdoors every night on the floor. I asked if he minded the hard surface, and his reply belongs to the days of the world’s divine simplicity. “Oh, Papa, it’s fine! I like to wake up in the night and look at the moon, and listen to the owl, and pee!”

I tried the experiment of fasting while doing my writing; a marvelous idea, to have no stomach at all to interfere with creative activity! A comedy sprang full-grown into my brain, and I wrote it in two days and a half of continuous work--a three-act play, _The Naturewoman_. I record the feat as a warning to my fellow writers--don’t try it! During a fast you are living on your nerves and cannot stand the strain of creative labor. When I finished, I could hardly digest a spoonful of orange juice.

_The Naturewoman_, like all my plays, had no success. It was published in the volume _Plays of Protest_ a couple of years later, and had no sale. Not long thereafter, the students of Smith College, studying drama under Samuel Eliot, gave it in New York, and these emancipated young ladies found it charmingly quaint and old-fashioned; they played it in a vein of gentle farce. Apparently it never occurred to them that the author might have meant it that way. I have frequently observed that an advocate of new ideas is not permitted to have a sense of humor; that is apparently reserved for persons who have no ideas at all. For fifty-six years I have been ridiculed for a passage in _The Jungle_ that deals with the moral claims of dying hogs--which passage was intended as hilarious farce. The New York _Evening Post_ described it as “nauseous hogwash”--and refused to publish my letter of explanation.

Corydon had come to Fairhope for a while, and then had gone north on affairs of her own; it had been arranged that she was to get a divorce from me. I thought that a novel about modern marriage that would show the possibility of a couple’s agreeing to part, and still remaining friends, would be interesting and useful. So I began _Love’s Pilgrimage_. In the spring I came north and took up my residence in another single-tax colony, at Arden, Delaware, founded and run by Frank Stephens, a sculptor of Philadelphia; a charming place about twenty miles from the big city, with many little cabins and bungalows scattered on the edge of the woods. Frank was glad to have me come--and alas, a year and a half later he was gladder to have me go! For the Philadelphia newspapers found me out, and thereafter, in the stories that appeared about Arden, socialism was more prominent than single tax, and I was more prominent than the founder. This was my misfortune, not my fault. I wanted nothing but to be let alone to write my book; but fate and the editors ruled otherwise.

XII

No bungalows being available in the neighborhood, I rented a lot and installed my ménage in three tents. Corydon, feeling it not yet convenient to get her divorce, occupied one of the tents, on a strictly literary basis. David had a troop of children to run all over the place with, and I had the book in which I was absorbed. It was turning out to be longer than I had planned--something that has frequently happened to my books.

The single-tax utopia, technically known as an enclave, had been founded by a group of men who were sick of grime, greed and strain, and fled away to a legend, the Forest of Arden. Some had a few dollars and could stay all the time; others went up to Philadelphia and were slaves in the daytime. On Saturday evenings they built a campfire in the woodland theater, sang songs and recited, and now and then gave _Robin Hood_ or _Midsummer Night’s Dream_. On holidays they would get up a fancy pageant and have a dance in the barn at night, and people would actually have a good time without getting drunk. One anarchist shoemaker was the only person who drank in Arden, so far as I know, and he has long since gone the way of drinkers.

Personally, I was never much for dressing up--not after the age of six or so, when my mother had made me into a baker boy for a fancy-dress party. But I liked to watch others more free of care; also I liked to have young fellows who would play tennis in the afternoon. There was Donald Stephens, son of the founder, and there were several of the children of Ella Reeve Bloor. One of these, Hal Ware, was my opponent in the finals of a tournament--I won’t say how it turned out! After the Russian Revolution, Hal went over in charge of the first American tractor unit; an odd turn of fate, that a dweller in the Forest of Arden should carry to the peasants of the steppes the dream of a utopia based upon machinery! Don Stephens served a year in the Delaware state prison as a conscientious objector to war, and then helped at the New York end of the Russian tractor work.

Also there was a young professor of the University of Pennsylvania, Scott Nearing--a mild liberal, impatient with my socialistic theories. Did my arguments make any impression on him? I never knew; but in time he was kicked out of the university, and then he traveled beyond me and called me the only revolutionist left in the Socialist Party. There was Will Price, Philadelphia architect, genial and burly--what a glorious Friar Tuck he made, or was it the Sheriff of Nottingham? No doubt he sits now in the single taxers’ heaven, engaged in a spirited debate with William Morris over the former’s theory of a railroad right of way owned by the public, with anybody allowed to run trains over it! Will had the misfortune to fall in love with my secretary, and she was in love with someone else; a mixup that will happen even in utopia.

Corydon was corresponding with the young lady from the Delta district of Mississippi--who had fasted and gained weight, according to my recommendation. She had then gone home, taking along a “health crank” nurse; she had put her father and mother on a fast, and to the horror of the local doctors, had cured them of “incurable” diseases. Now this Miss Kimbrough was writing a book, _The Daughter of the Confederacy_, dealing with the tragic life story of Winnie Davis, daughter of Jefferson Davis. Winnie had fallen in love with a Yankee, had been forced to renounce him, and had died of a broken heart. Judge Kimbrough had been Mrs. Davis’ lawyer, and had fallen heir to the Davis heirlooms and letters. Mary Craig Kimbrough now wrote that she needed someone to advise her about the book, and Corydon went south to help her with the manuscript.

David and I put a stove in our tents and prepared to hibernate in the snowbound Forest of Arden. How many of the so-called necessities men can dispense with when they have to! Once I was asked to drive a youthful guest a couple of miles in a car, so that he might find a barber and get a shave; I was too polite to tell this guest that I had never been shaved by a barber in my life. In New York I heard another young man of delicate rearing

[Illustration: _Priscilla Harden Sinclair_]

[Illustration: _Upton Beall Sinclair, Sr._]

[Illustration: _Upton Sinclair at the age of eight_]

[Illustration: _Upton Sinclair at twenty-seven, when he was writing_ The Jungle]

[Illustration: _Winston Churchill reviews_ The Jungle]

[Illustration: _George Bernard Shaw_ at Ayot-St. Lawrence, about 1913]

[Illustration: _Mary Craig Sinclair and Upton Sinclair in Bermuda, 1913_]

[Illustration: _George Sterling, his wife, Carrie, and Jack London_]

[Illustration: _Mrs. Kate Crane-Gartz_]

[Illustration: _Sergei Eisenstein, about 1933_]

[Illustration: _Upton Sinclair during the EPIC campaign, 1934_]

[Illustration: _Upton Sinclair and Harry Hopkins, 1934_]

[Illustration: Flivver King _in Detroit, 1937_]

[Illustration: _Upton Sinclair, about 1960, with autographed picture of Albert Einstein_]

[Illustration:

MILTON K. BELL

_Upton Sinclair standing before his home in Monrovia, California_]

[Illustration:

DON CRAVENS

_May Hard Sinclair and Upton Sinclair, 1962_]

[Illustration:

DON CRAVENS

_Upton Sinclair with seventy-nine of the books he has written_]

lament the fact that the servant did not always remember to draw the water for his bath; I was tempted to narrate how I bathed every morning of that winter in Arden with water in a tin washbasin and a newspaper spread upon a tent floor. I remember our Christmas turkey, which we hung up outside in the cold; we cooked it joint by joint, hung by a wire inside the little round wood stove. Nobody’s turkey ever tasted better.

When Mitchell Kennerley accepted _Love’s Pilgrimage_, and paid me an advance of twelve hundred and fifty dollars, I decided to build a house on my single-tax lot at the edge of the Forest of Arden. Frank Stephens was the builder, and I didn’t hold it against him that, like all other builders, he underestimated the cost. It came to twenty-six hundred dollars and kept me scratching for quite a while. I was contributing articles to _Physical Culture_ at a hundred and fifty dollars a month, which provided my living.

The little two-story cottage was completed early in the spring of 1911. It was painted brown on the outside, and stained on the inside. There was a living room in front with an open fireplace and a chimney that smoked. High on the wall, a shelf ran all the way round and held most of my books. In the rear was one small bedroom, and a still smaller kitchen, plus a bathroom without plumbing. Upstairs was an attic that I planned some day to make into two rooms. We moved in, feeling most luxurious after the tents. Next door was a one-room cabin belonging to Scott Nearing; I rented it for a study, and so had everything of a material nature that a man of letters could desire.

The Forest of Arden turned green again, and put flower carpets on its floor, and the tennis court was rolled and marked, and everything was jolly. The young people were preparing _The Merchant of Venice_, and the Esperantists of America held a convention in the big barn; I studied that language for three weeks, and when I went to supper at the inn I would say, _“Mi desiras lo puddingo”_--at least that is the way I recall it after fifty years. I was writing a sequel to _Love’s Pilgrimage_, which I completed but have never published.

Unknown to me, the fates had been weaving a net about my life; and now they were ready to draw it tight. Corydon wrote that Mary Craig Kimbrough was coming to New York to talk with a publisher who had read her life of Winnie Davis, and that she, Corydon, was coming with her. Also there came a letter from Harry Kemp, saying that he was finishing at the university, and was then going to “beat” his way east and visit Arden. George Sterling was on his way from California to New York--he too was to be tied up in that net!

There was an odd development, which served as a sort of curtain raiser to the main tragedy. A little discussion club got into a dispute with George Brown, the anarchist shoemaker. The club members were accustomed to hold meetings in the outdoor theater, and Brown would come and air his opinions on the physiology of sex. The women and girls didn’t like it. They asked him to shut up, but he stood on the elemental right of an anarchist to say anything anywhere at any time. He broke up several meetings--until finally the executives of the club went to Wilmington and swore out a warrant for his arrest for disturbing the peace.

That, of course, brought the newspaper reporters, and put my picture in the papers again. I had had nothing to do with the discussion club or with the arrest of Brown, but I lived in Arden and was part of the scenery. The anarchist was sentenced to five days on the rockpile at the state prison; he came back boiling with rage and plotting a dire revenge: he would have all the members of the baseball team arrested for playing on Sunday, and _they_ would have a turn on the rockpile! He would add Upton Sinclair, who had been playing tennis on Sunday, and thus would punish Arden by putting it on the front page of every newspaper in America. He carried out this scheme, and eleven of us were summoned to court, and under a long-forgotten statute, dating from 1793, were sentenced to eighteen hours on the rockpile. This made one of the funniest newspaper stories ever telegraphed over the world--you may find the details in _The Brass Check_ if you are curious. What the anarchist shoemaker did not realize, and what nobody else realized, was that he was setting the stage and assembling the audience for the notorious Sinclair-Kemp divorce scandal. The fates were against me.

_8_

_Exile_

I

The story of Corydon and Thyrsis comes now to its painful climax. They had been married for eleven years, and for the last seven or eight had realized that they were mismated. They talked much of divorce, and according to accepted conventions, Corydon was the one to get it. But the world made divorce difficult and placed handicaps upon a divorced woman; so Corydon kept hesitating, taking one step forward and two steps back.

If this story belonged to Thyrsis alone, he would tell it all, on the theory that the past is past and never returns, and the only use we can make of blunders is to help others in avoiding them. But the story is Corydon’s also, and Corydon found herself a new husband and a new life, and has long since retired from the limelight.

Thyrsis, an unhappily married man, bore among his friends the reputation of being “puritanical”; a onetime virtue that now ranks as a dangerous disease. About the bedside of the patient gather the psychoanalysts and up-to-the-minute “intellectuals”; they take his temperature, or lack of it, and shake their heads anxiously over his subnormal condition. Jack London was much worried about Thyrsis and wrote warning letters; but in the course of time, Jack’s own theories brought him to a situation where he could not have his wife and another woman at the same time, and so he voluntarily removed himself from the world. Then Frank Harris took over the case of Thyrsis and prescribed for the patient a tempestuous love affair. No man can become a great novelist without one, it seems, nor can a modern autobiography be worthy of suppression by the police unless it contains several adulteries per volume.

Let the fact be recorded that Thyrsis was capable of falling in love, and if he did not do it frequently, it was because he had so many other matters on his mind. There is a story having to do with this period, which ought to be told because of the satisfaction it will bring to the lovers of love, and to those who dislike the puritanical Thyrsis and will be pleased to see him “get his.”

It was the winter of 1910-11, when Corydon had gone south, having once more decided upon a divorce. Thyrsis was a free man, so he thought--and, incidentally, a lonely and restless one. He was thirty-two at this time, and went up to New York to attend a gathering in Carnegie Hall, where the Intercollegiate Socialist Society was acting as host to Victor Berger, socialist Congressman-elect. Thyrsis came early, and in one of the aisles came face to face with a lovely young woman of twenty-one or two, wearing the red badge of an usher. In those observant eyes and that frank open countenance was revealed something he had been seeking for a long time; there was a mental flash, and the two moved automatically toward each other. Said she, without hesitation: “You are Thyrsis?” Said he: “You are Inez Milholland?”

A Vassar girl, with a wealthy father, Inez had joined the Socialist Party and had become an active suffragette--all of which, of course, made a sensation in the newspapers. That evening, after the meeting, Thyrsis went with her to her hotel, and they sat in the lobby conversing until three o’clock in the morning, when the place was deserted by all but the night watchman. What did they not talk about, in the vast range of the socialist and suffrage movements in America, and in England, where Inez had been to school; the people they knew, the books they had read, the events that the future held behind its veil!

“I never met anyone I could talk to so easily,” said Thyrsis; and Inez returned the compliment. “But don’t fall in love with me,” she added. When he asked, “Why not?” she answered, “I am already in love, and you would only make yourself unhappy.” Later, she told him that she too was unhappy; it was a married man, and she would not break up another woman’s home but would only eat her heart out. Again that old, old story that Heine sings, and for which neither socialists nor suffragists have any remedy!

_Es ist eine alte Geschichte_ _Doch klingt sie immer neu._

Inez desired to meet Berger, and he came next morning. The three of us went for a drive and had lunch at the Claremont. We spent the afternoon walking in the park, then had dinner at the hotel, and spent the evening together, solving all the problems of human society. It was another intellectual explosion, this time _à trois_. Said the socialist Congressman: “Thyrsis, if it wouldn’t be that I am a family man, I would run away with that girl so quick you would never see her once again.” Thyrsis repeated that to Inez, who smiled and said, “He is mistaken; it is not like that.”

Thyrsis disregarded the sisterly advice that had been given to him. He fell in love--with such desperate and terrifying violence as he had never conceived possible in his hard-working, sober life. He understood for the first time the meaning of that ancient symbol of the little archer with the bow and arrow. Commonplace as the metaphor seemed, there was no other to be used; it was like being shot--a convulsive pain, a sense of complete collapse, an anguish repeated, day after day, without any respite or hope of it.

He could not give up. It seemed to him that here was the woman who had been made for him, and the thought that he had to lose her was not to be borne. He would go back to Arden and write letters--such mad, wild, pain-distracted letters as would satisfy the most exacting intellectual, the most implacable hater of Puritans! Inez afterward assured him that she had destroyed these letters, which was kind of her. She was always kind, and straightforward, saying what she meant, as men and women will do in utopia.

The storm passed, as storms do, and new life came to Thyrsis. Four years afterward he met Inez Milholland again. She was now married, and it seemed to Thyrsis that the world had laid its paralyzing hand upon her; she was no longer simple, in the manner of the early gods. Was it that the spell was broken? Or was it that Thyrsis had an abnormal dislike for fashionable costumes, large picture hats, and long jade earrings? Another two years, and Inez, a suffrage politician, came out to California and broke her heart trying to carry the state for Hughes, on the theory that he would be more generous to the cause than Woodrow Wilson. This was supposed to be strategy, but to Thyrsis it seemed insanity. In any case, what a melancholy descent from the young ardors of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society! She died of exhaustion.

II

The story of Corydon and Thyrsis comes to an end in the year 1911. George Sterling was coming from California, Harry Kemp from Kansas; Mary Craig Kimbrough was in New York to consult with a publisher, and Corydon had come with her.

George Sterling, the day of his arrival, came to call upon Corydon in her father’s home. There he met the young lady from Mississippi and promptly fell upon his knees before her, after the fashion of romantic poets, even after they are forty. She was pale from a winter’s labor over manuscript, and George called her a “star in alabaster” and other extravagant things that moved her to merry laughter. Later on, Thyrsis met the couple walking on the street and stopped to greet them. Said Thyrsis matter-of-factly: “You don’t look well, Craig. Really, you look like a skull!” George raged, “I am going to kill that man some day!” But Craig replied, “There is the first man in the world who ever told me the truth.”

George Sterling, an unhappily married man, wanted to marry Craig. She told him, “I can never love any man.” When he demanded to know the reason, she told him that her heart had been broken by an early love affair at home; she knew she would never love again. But the poet could not accept that statement; he began writing sonnets to her--more than a hundred in the course of the next year. Eighteen years later it was my sad duty to edit these _Sonnets to Craig_ for publication, and they were received by the high-brow literary world with some uncertainty. They have a fatal defect--it is possible to understand what they mean. Literary tastes move in cycles, and just now poetry lovers are impressed by eccentricities of language and punctuation. But the day will come when they care about real feelings, expressed in musical language, and then they will thrill to such lines as these:

All gracious things, and delicate and sweet, Within the spaces of thy beauty meet

And again:

Sweet in this love are terrors that beguile And joys that make a hazard of my breath.

And again:

Stand back from me! Have mercy for a space, Lest madness break thine image in my mind!

In connection with this unhappy love affair, there was another curious tangle of circumstances. The girlhood sweetheart of Craig in the Far South had brought to her a poem so sad that it had moved her to tears, and she had carried it ever since in her memory. “The Man I Might Have Been” was its title--the grief-stricken cry of those who fall into the trap of John Barleycorn. Now here was the author of that poem, in love with the same woman; and both the unhappy suitors--the Southern boy and the crowned poet of California--were fated to end their lives by their own hands, and those of John Barleycorn.

Thyrsis was invited up to New York to give advice about the life of Winnie Davis. It was April and happened to be warm, so he wore tennis shoes because they were comfortable; to make up for this informality he added kid gloves--which seemed to Mary Craig Kimbrough of Mississippi the funniest combination ever heard of. She said nothing, being the soul of politeness; but her lively red-brown eyes took in everything. She was learning about these strange new creatures called radicals, and their ideas, some of which appeared sensible and others crazy. Watching Thyrsis, she thought, “The funny, funny man!” She watched him, thinking the same thought for a matter of half a century; but she did not always have to be polite about it.

Corydon, Thyrsis, and Craig settled themselves in the little cottage on the edge of the Forest of Arden. Springtime had come, and the Arden folk were giving _Midsummer Night’s Dream_; Corydon was Titania, in yellow tights and a golden crown. At this juncture came Harry Kemp, having completed another year at the University of Kansas; he was lugging two suitcases full of books and manuscripts, plus an extra blue shirt and a pair of socks. There was a girl at Arden who was a lover of poetry, and Thyrsis, fond matchmaker, had the idea that the poet might become interested in this girl. But the fates had other plans, and were not slow to reveal them. Corydon was interested in the poet.

It was during this time that Harry Kemp wrote a sonnet to Thyrsis and handed it to him with the words, “You may publish this some day.” It will not be ranked as a great sonnet, but it is curious as a part of the story; so, after Harry’s death, his permission is accepted.

Child, wandering down the great world for a day And with a child’s soul seeing thru and thru The passing prejudice to Truth’s own view. Immortal spirit robed in mortal day, Striving to find and follow the one way That is your way, none other’s--to be true To that which makes a sincere man of you! Still be yourself, and let tongues say their say!

Still fling the seed with daring hand abroad, And, then, mayhap, the Race to come will be Gladdened, with ripened fruit and bursting pod Of Love, and Brotherhood, and Liberty-- Open to Nature and Her Laws from God As spreading gulfs lie open to the Sea!

III

Corydon went to New York, to the apartment of her mother and father, which was vacant in the summer. Harry followed her; and then came Thyrsis, and the great divorce scandal burst upon the world. It was made by the newspapers, so the story had to be told in _The Brass Check_. There seems no good reason to repeat it here; suffice it to say that Thyrsis found himself presented in the capitalist press as having taught his wife free love and then repudiated her when she took him at his word. The newspapers invented statements, they set traps, and betrayed confidences--and when they got through with their victim, they had turned his hair gray.

Corydon and Harry fled from the storm. But after a few days they came back; and then there were interviews of many columns, and Sunday-supplement pages with many pictures, in the course of which the great American public learned all about Thyrsis’ dietetic eccentricities and his objections to coffee and cigarettes. Corydon caused vast glee to the New York smart set by describing her life partner as “an essential monogamist”; those who read and laughed did not remember that only last week they had read that he was a “free lover.” As a matter of fact, neither the writers nor the readers knew what was meant by either term, so the incongruity did not trouble them.

Thyrsis filed suit for divorce in New York state, which is ruled by Catholic laws, administered by Catholic judges. If in his writings you find a certain acerbity toward the Catholic political machine, bear in mind these experiences, which seared into a writer’s soul scars never to be effaced. The Catholic judge appointed a “referee” to hear testimony in the case, and this referee, moved by stupidity plus idle curiosity, asked Thyrsis questions concerning his wife’s actions that under the New York law the husband was not permitted to answer. But the referee demanded that they be answered, and what was Thyrsis to do? He answered; so the Catholic judge had a pretext upon which to reject the recommendation of his referee.

The court and the referee had between them several hundred dollars of Thyrsis’ hard-earned money, which, under the law, they were permitted to keep--even though Thyrsis got no divorce. He filed another suit and paid more money, and waited another three or four months, in the midst of journalistic excursions and alarms. Another referee took testimony, and this time was careful to ask only the exactly prescribed questions; in due course another decision was handed down by another Catholic judge, who had also been “seen” by parties interested. This time the decision was that Thyrsis had failed to beat up his wife, or to choke or stab or poison her, or otherwise manifest masculine resentment at her unfaithfulness; therefore he was suspected of “collusion,” and the application was again denied. Of course the judge did not literally say that Thyrsis should have behaved in those violent ways; but that was the only possible implication of his decision. When a husband was fair and decent, desiring his dissatisfied wife to find happiness if she could--that was a dangerous and unorthodox kind of behavior, suggestive of “radical” ideas. Men and women suspected of harboring such ideas should be punished by being tied together in the holy bonds of matrimony and left to tear each other to pieces like the Kilkenny cats.

In February 1912 Thyrsis took his son and departed for Europe, traveling second-class in a third-class Italian steamer; sick in body and soul, and not sure whether he was going to live or die, nor caring very much. He had managed to borrow a little money for the trip, and he had a job, writing monthly articles for _Physical Culture Magazine_ for a hundred and fifty dollars each. As a writer of books he was destroyed, and nobody thought he would ever have a public again. Mitchell Kennerley, publisher of _Love’s Pilgrimage_, remarked, “If people can read about you for two cents, they are not going to pay a dollar and a half to do it.” _Love’s Pilgrimage_ had been published a month or two before the divorce scandal broke and had started as a whirlwind success--selling a thousand copies a week. The week after the scandal broke, it dropped dead, and the publisher did not sell a hundred copies in a year.

IV

Springtime in Florence! “_Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluehn?_” Could any man walk under Tuscan skies in March and fail to be happy? George D. Herron had a villa on the slopes towards Fiesole, where he lived in what peace he could find; Thyrsis spent a couple of weeks with him, and talked over old times and the state of the world, with the great cataclysm of World War I only two years and a half in the future. Carrie Rand Herron played Schumann’s _Widmung_ in the twilight--and for her a death by cancer was even nearer than the war.

Was Thyrsis happy? In truth, he hardly knew where he was or what he was doing. Places and events went by as if in a dream, and nothing had meaning unless it spoke of pain and enslavement, in America as in Italy. The grim castle of Strozzi was an incarnation in stone of the Beef Trust or the Steel Trust. Crowds of olive-skinned starving children with sore eyes, peering out of doorways of tenements in the back streets of Florence, were simply Mulberry Row in New York. Galleries full of multiplied madonnas and crucified martyrs spoke of Tammany Hall and its Catholic machine, with Catholic cops twisting the arms of socialist working girls on the picket line; Catholic archbishops striding down the aisle of a hall commanding the police to arrest women lecturers on birth control; Catholic judges sitting on the bench in black silk robes, punishing socialist muckrakers for being too decent to their erring wives.

Milan: a great city, with many sights, but for Thyrsis only one attraction--a socialist paper in an obscure working-class quarter, with an editor who was translating Thyrsis’ books. And then Switzerland, with towering snow-clad mountains and clear blue lakes--and another socialist editor. Then Germany, and one of the Lietz schools, a new experiment in education, where Thyrsis had arranged to leave his son: a lovely spot on the edge of the Harz Mountains, with a troop of merry youngsters living the outdoor life. Nearby were miles of potatoes and sugar beets, with Polish women working in gangs like Negro slaves. There was another school in Schloss Bieberstein, for the older boys, fine strapping fellows, bare-legged and bare-armed, hardened to the cold, and ready for the slaughter pits; in three years most of them would be turned into manure for potatoes and sugar beets.

Then Holland, where Frederik van Eeden had undertaken to help Thyrsis get the freedom that was not to be had in New York. A lawyer was consulted and put the matter up to the startled judges of the Amsterdam courts. Under the Dutch law, the husband was not required to prove that he had beaten or choked or poisoned his wife; he might receive a divorce on the basis of a signed statement by the wife, admitting infidelity. But what about granting this privilege to a wandering author from America? How long would he have to remain a resident of Holland in order to be entitled to the benefit of civilized and enlightened law? The judges finally agreed that they would admit this one American to their clemency--but never again! Amsterdam was not going to be turned into another Reno!

V

A visit to England. Gaylord Wilshire was living in Hampstead, endeavoring to finance his gold mine in London. The great coal strike was on, and Tom Mann, editor of a syndicalist newspaper, was sent to jail for six months. Wilshire, who by now had come to despair of political action for the workers, leaped into the breach, and he and Thyrsis got out several issues of the paper--the contribution of the latter consisting of a debate in which he opposed the leading idea of the editor. Apparently that satisfied the London police, for the eccentric Americans were allowed to argue without molestation. The newspaper reporters came swarming, and it was a novel experience for Thyrsis to give interviews and read next morning what he said, instead of how he looked and what he ate and how his wife had run away with a “box-car poet.”

Some things he liked in England, and some not. A ghastly thing to see the effect upon the human race of slow starvation continued through many centuries! Here were creatures distorted out of human semblance; swarms of them turning out on a bank holiday to play, having forgotten how to run, almost how to walk; shambling like apes, drooping like baboons, guffawing with loud noises, speaking a jabber hardly to be understood. They lay around on Hampstead Heath, men and women in each others’ arms, a sight new to an American. Whether they were drunk or sober was difficult for a stranger to tell.

The miners’ strike committee held its meetings in the Westminster Hotel; and just across the way were the Parliament buildings, and labor members to welcome a socialist author. John Burns took Thyrsis onto the floor of the House to hear the debate on the settlement of the coal strike, a full-dress affair reported all over the world; Asquith versus Balfour, or rather both of them versus the working masses of Britain. This was what capitalism considered statesmanship--this hodgepodge of cant and cruelty, bundled in a gray fog of dullness. Thyrsis sat in a sacred seat, where no visitor was supposed to be, and gazed upon rows of savages in silk hats, roaring for what little blood was left in the veins of half-starved miners’ families. He clenched his hands until his nails made holes in his skin.

When the great lawyer Asquith was in the midst of his sophistries, the young American could stand no more; he half rose from his seat, with his mouth open to say what he thought of these starvers of British labor. Half a dozen times he rose, with words starting from his throat, and half a dozen times he sank back again. They would have arrested him, no doubt, and his protest would have been heard. But it would also have gone to Amsterdam, where the polite judges had still to decide the problem of the custody of Thyrsis’ son!

Thyrsis went out and visited Westminster Abbey, where he was swept by a storm of horror and loathing; wandering among marble tombs and statues of ruling-class killers and the poets and men of genius who had betrayed the muse to Mammon. High-vaulting arches, lost in dimness; priests in jeweled robes, and white-clad choirs chanting incessant subjection; a blaze of candles, a haze of altar smoke, and mental slaves with heads bowed in their arms--the very living presence of that giant Fear, in the name of which the organized crimes of the ages have been committed. Here was the explanation of those swarms on Hampstead Heath, deprived of human semblance; here was the meaning of pettifogging lawyers and noble earls and silk-hatted savages shouting for the lifeblood of starving miners; here was the very body and blood of that Godhead of Capitalism--

Great Christus-Jingo, at whose feet Christian and Jew and Atheist meet!

VI

Miss Mary Craig Kimbrough came traveling. It was natural that a young lady from Mississippi should desire to see art galleries and meet celebrities in England; and if she came as the guest of an earl and a countess, that would surely be respectable according to Mississippi standards. It so happened that the noble earl was a bit of a radical and had had his own marital scandal. He had gone to Reno, Nevada, and got himself divorced from an unsatisfactory marriage; then, upon his remarriage in England, his peers had haled him before them, convicted him of bigamy, and sentenced him to six months in jail.

A tremendous uproar in its day, but it had been many days ago; the English nobility are a numerous family, which Mississippi could hardly be expected to keep straight. Craig’s father had the general impression, held by every old-fashioned Southern gentleman, that the English nobility are a depraved lot; but on the other hand, Craig’s mother knew that they are socially irresistible. She proved it whenever, at a gathering of the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, she was asked for news about her daughter who was visiting the Countess Russell in London.

“Aunt Molly” was a plump little Irish lady, the warmest hearted soul that ever carried a heavy title. She had had her own divorce tragedy, and her warm Irish heart was with Thyrsis. She had published two or three novels, and for writing purposes had a retreat, an ancient cottage on the edge of a village not far from Eton. It was so low that you had to stoop to get through the doorway, and its chimney had smoked for at least three hundred years; but it was newly plastered inside, and furnished with antiques and bright chintzes. Here Aunt Molly brought her protegée, and Thyrsis came from Holland to collect local color for the new novel, _Sylvia_, which he was making out of Craig’s tales of her girlhood in the Far South. In after years the heroine would stop in the middle of an anecdote, look puzzled, and say, “Did that really happen to me? Or is it one of the things we made up for _Sylvia_?”

One glimpse of the British aristocracy at home. The novel Thyrsis was writing dealt with a splendid young Harvard millionaire, one of whose friends remarks that he deliberately cultivated the brutal manners of the British upper classes toward their social inferiors. Craig was distressed by this, insisting that it couldn’t be true; finally it was agreed that Aunt Molly should be the arbitrator. The problem was submitted, and this high authority laughed and said, “Well, look at Frank!” She went on to tell anecdotes portraying the bad manners of his lordship, her husband; also of his uncles and his cousins, Lord This and the Marquis of That and the Duke of Other. Craig subsided, and the sentence stands as it was written.

Thyrsis, himself, walking along the road in his everyday clothes, saw a fancy equipage drive up and halt, while the occupants asked him the way to a certain place; having been politely answered, the lady and gentleman drove on without so much as a nod of thanks. On another occasion, while walking, he attempted to ask the way of a gentleman out for a constitutional, and this person stalked by without a sound or a glance. Mentioning this experience to a conventional Englishman, Thyrsis received the following explanation: “But if one entered into talk with any stranger who hailed him on the road, one might meet all sorts of undesirable persons!”

VI

To Aunt Molly’s home in London came H. G. Wells, and with the countess’ half-dozen tiny white dogs dancing in their laps, the two social philosophers compared their views on the state of the world. Wells had now come to the conclusion it would take about three hundred years to get socialism, which to Thyrsis seemed the same as being a die-hard tory. Wells took him to lunch at the New Reform Club, and as they were leaving the dining room, he stopped and whispered that Thyrsis now had an opportunity to observe the Grand Khan of Anglo-American literature, Henry James, eating a muttonchop. On the landing halfway down the stairs they ran into Hilaire Belloc, who held them with half an hour of brilliance. He exhibited an amazing familiarity with the medieval world and its manifold futilities. It was like an exhibition of a million dollars’ worth of skyrockets and pyrotechnical set pieces; when it was over, you went away with nothing.

Also Thyrsis met Frank Harris, possessor of a golden tongue. Harris would talk about Jesus and Shakespeare in words so beautiful that only those masters could have matched it; but in the midst of his eloquence something would turn his thoughts to a person he disliked, and there would pour from the same throat such a stream of abuse as might have shocked a fallen archangel. Harris invited the young author to lunch at an expensive hotel and spent four or five pounds on the occasion; politeness forbade Thyrsis to hint his feelings of distress at such a demonstration. He would not partake of the costly wines, and could have lived for a couple of weeks on such an expenditure. Not long after this, Harris published in a magazine his solution of all the problems of health--which was to use a stomach pump, get rid of all you had eaten, and start over again.

Then Bernard Shaw. For eight or nine years Thyrsis had followed our modern Voltaire with admiration, but also with some fear of his sharp tongue. When he met him, he discovered the kindest and sweetest-tempered of humans, the cleanest, also; he had bright blue eyes, a red-gold beard turning gray, and the face of a mature angel. The modern Voltaire motored Thyrsis out to his country place and gave him a muttonchop or something for lunch, while he himself ate ascetic beans and salad, and admitted sadly that his periodic headaches might possibly be due to excess of starch, as Thyrsis suggested. To listen to G. B. S. at lunch was exactly like hearing him at Albert Hall or reading one of his prefaces; he would talk an endless stream of wit and laughter, with never a pause or a dull moment.

After lunch they walked to see the old church. Not even a modern Voltaire could imagine a visitor from America failing to be interested in looking at the ruins of an old church! On the way they came to a sign warning motorists that they were passing a school. Thyrsis asked, “Where is the school?” His host laughed and explained, “This is England. The school was moved some years ago, but we haven’t got round to moving the sign yet. The motorists slow up, and then, just after they have got up speed again, they come to the school.”

Years back, Thyrsis had met May Sinclair, then visiting in New York. Those were the days of _The Divine Fire_--does anyone remember that novel? Thyrsis had sent it to Jack London, who wrote that if he could write one such story, he would be willing to die. Now in London, Thyrsis went to see May Sinclair at her studio, and listened while she received another visitor to tea and asked him questions. It was a shy youth, a shop assistant in London, who had been invited because May Sinclair was writing a book about such a person and wished to know what hours he worked, what his duties were, and so on. One could guess that the poor youth had never been in such company before, and never would be again.

The class lines are tightly drawn in that tight little island. May Sinclair told me a little story about H. G. Wells, who had begun life as a shop assistant; talking to Wells about the novel she was writing, she asked him some question about the dialect of a shop assistant. Wells flushed with annoyance and said: “How should _I_ know?” Thyrsis thought that was a dreadful story, so dreadful that he covered his face with his hands when he heard it. May Sinclair was distressed, because she hadn’t meant to gossip--she hadn’t realized how this anecdote would sound to an American socialist.

VIII

Thyrsis went back to Holland, which was supposed to be his residence. He was not deceiving the honorable judges of the Amsterdam courts--he really did mean to live in Holland, where everybody was so polite and where, alone of all places in Europe, they did not give you short change, or coins made of lead. It was an unusually cold and rainy summer--the peasants of France were reported to be gathering their hay from boats. Thyrsis sat in a little room, doing his writing by a wood stove, and waiting in vain for the sun to appear. His friend Van Eeden took him walking and pointed out the beautiful effects of the tumbled clouds on the horizon. “These are the clouds that our Dutch painters have made so famous!” But Thyrsis did not want to paint clouds, he wanted to get warm.

Craig came to Holland, and Dr. Van Eeden and his wife introduced her to staid burgomasters’ wives, who were as much thrilled to meet the granddaughter of American slave owners as she was to meet Dutch dignitaries. Because Van Eeden had been through a divorce scandal in his own life, he could sympathize with the troubled pair. An odd fact, that all the friends who helped him through these days of trial--the Herrons in Italy, the Wilshires and Russells in England, the Van Eedens in Holland--had been through the divorce mill.

Frederick van Eeden was at this time in his fifties, the best-known novelist and poet of his country. But the country was too small, he said--it was discouraging to write for only seven million people! He had had a varied career--physician, pioneer psychotherapist, then labor leader and founder of a colony like Thyrsis; he lived on the remains of this colony, a small estate called Walden. His beard was turning gray, but his mind was still omnivorous, and he and his young American friend ranged the world in their arguments.

Van Eeden s wife was a quiet woman, young in years but old in fashion, the heroine of Van Eeden’s _Bride of Dreams_; she sat by and did her sewing and seemed a trifle shocked when the young lady from Mississippi ventured to poke fun at the ideas of her lord and master. Her two little children were lacking altogether in American boisterousness; their utmost limit of self-assertion was to stand by Thyrsis’ chair at suppertime, and watch him with big round eyes while he ate a fig, and whisper “Ik ok!”--that is, “Me, too!” Thyrsis found the Dutch language a source of great amusement, and he evolved a rule for getting along; first say it in German, and if that is not understood, say it in English, and if that is not understood, say it halfway between.

Van Eeden took Thyrsis to Berlin, where they visited a young German poet, Erich Gutkind, who under the pen name of Volker had published an ecstatic book that Van Eeden expected to outmode Nietzsche. A charming young Jewish couple--Thyrsis called them the _Gute Kinder_, and sometimes the _Sternengucker_, because of the big telescope they had on the roof of their home. Van Eeden and Gutkind were on fire with a plan to form a band of chosen spirits to lead mankind out of the wilderness of materialism; Thyrsis brought tears into the young rhapsodist’s eyes by the brutality of his insistence that the sacred band would have to decide the problem of social revolution first.

All three of these men saw the war coming, and the problem of what to do about it occupied their thoughts. Thyrsis had written a manifesto against war, calling on the socialist parties of the world to pledge themselves to mass insurrection against it. He had found sympathy among socialists in England and France, but very little in Germany. Karl Kautsky had written that the agitation of such a program would be illegal in Germany--which apparently settled it with him and his party. Thyrsis now spent a day with Kautsky and his wife and son--_die heilige Familie_, as their enemies dubbed them. He debated the problem with Suedekum, with Fischer, with Ledebour and Liebknecht; the latter two escorted him about the Reichstag and took him to lunch--in a separate dining room where Social Democratic members were herded, apart from the rest! Ledebour and Liebknecht were sympathetic to his program, but could not promise any effective action, and what they told him had much to do with Thyrsis’ decision to support the Allies in 1917.

IX

Yes, the war was not far away. Military men with bristling mustaches were strutting about, jostling ordinary folk out of the way, staring over the heads of the men, and into the faces of women. “Papa, why do they twist their mustaches into points?” inquired David, eleven years old, and the answer was, “It is to frighten you.” “But it doesn’t frighten me,” said the little boy. However, it frightened his father, so that he removed his son from the German school to one in England.

The _Gute Kinder_ took their guests driving to see the sights of Berlin, including the monstrous statues of the Sieges Allee. Thyrsis thought he had never seen anything so funny since the beginning of his life. He found something funnier to say about each one--until his host leaned over and signaled him to be quiet, pointing to the cab driver up in front. More than once it had happened that a ribald foreigner, daring to commit _lèse-majesté_ in the hearing of a Prussian ex-soldier, had been driven to the police station and placed under arrest.

Thyrsis was invited to meet Walter Rathenau. He had never heard the name, but his friends explained that this was the young heir of the great German electrical trust; he went in for social reform and wrote bold books. They were driven to the Kaiserlicher Automobil Klub, a gorgeous establishment, with footmen in short pants and silk stockings. There was a private dining room and an elaborate repast, including plovers’ eggs, a dish of which Thyrsis had never heard and which proved to be dangerous in practice, since you never knew what you were going to find when you cracked a shell. Thereafter the irreverent strangers always referred to Rathenau as _Kiebitzei_.

They united in finding him genial but a trifle overconfident--an attitude that accompanies the possession of vast sums of money and the necessity of making final decisions upon great issues. Van Eeden was a much older man who had made himself a reputation in many different fields--yet he did not feel so certain about anything as he found this young master of electricity and finance. However, there is this to be added: it is the men who know what they think who are capable of action. Walter Rathenau would no doubt have made over German industry along more social and human lines if the reactionaries had not murdered him.

X

The Dutch divorce was granted, in pleasant fashion, without Thyrsis having to appear in court. Craig, who was back in England under the wing of her earl and countess, now wished to return to Mississippi to persuade her parents to let her marry a divorced man; Thyrsis also wished to go, having a new novel to market. These were the happy days before the passport curse, so it was possible to travel incognito and land in New York without newspaper excitement. In the interest of propriety, the pair traveled on separate steamers. Craig came on the _Lusitania_, ship of ill fate for her as for others; in a stormy December passage she was thrown and broke the bones at the base of the spine, which caused her suffering for many years, and made a hard task yet harder for her.

The siege of the family began. The father was a judge and knew the law--at least he knew his own kind, and took no stock in a piece of engraved stationery from Amsterdam that he could not read. “Daughter, you cannot marry a married man!” That was all he would say; and the answer, “Papa, I have made up my mind to marry him!” meant nothing. She would spend her nights weeping--an old story in her life. She was his first child, and her portrait, a beautiful oil painting, hung in the drawing room; when she went away to New York again, he put this portrait up in the attic.

Thyrsis, meantime, was interviewing publishers--an old story in _his_ life. Mitchell Kennerley had no use for _Sylvia--it_ was not in the modern manner. Thyrsis’ fate was to wander from one publisher to another--since he would not obey the rules of their game. Literary works were turned out according to pattern, stamped with a trademark, and sold to customers who wanted another exactly like the last. A new publisher came forward, an old-fashioned one; but apparently the buyers of old-fashioned novels distrusted the Thyrsis label. _Sylvia_ sold only moderately, and the sequel, _Sylvia’s Marriage_, hardly sold at all. Two thousand copies in America and a hundred thousand in Great Britain--that was a record for a prophet in his own country!

It was a time of stirring among the foreign-born workers in America, and Thyrsis and other young enthusiasts thought it was the beginning of the change for which they prayed. There was a strike of silkworkers in Paterson, New Jersey, and the intelligentsia of Greenwich Village made weekend pilgrimages for strike relief and oratory. Leading the strike were Bill Haywood, grim old one-eyed miners’ chief from the Rockies; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who had begun her rebel career as a high-school girl in New York; Carlo Tresca, his face and body scarred by the bullets of his masters’ gunmen; Joe Ettor and Arthur Giovannitti, fresh from a frame-up for murder in Massachusetts. Helping them, and at the same time studying them for copy, were budding young novelists such as Leroy Scott and Ernest Poole; a dramatist, Thompson Buchanan, who was later to employ his knowledge in the concoction of anti-Bolshevik nightmares; and John Reed, war correspondent, whose bones were destined to lie in the Kremlin in less than ten years.

They besought Thyrsis to join them; he yielded to the temptation, and once more saw the busy pencils of the newspaper reporters flying. Did they make up the false quotations themselves, or was their copy doctored in the office? Impossible to say; but Thyrsis saw himself quoted as advising violence, which he had never done in his life. He filed the clippings away, and filed the rage in his heart. It was still six years to the writing of _The Brass Check_.

A terrible thing to see tens of thousands of human beings starved into slavery, held down by policemen’s clubs and newspaper slanders. The young sympathizers were desperate, and in the hope of moving the heart of New York, they planned the “Paterson Pageant”--to bring two thousand silkworkers to the stage of Madison Square Garden and give a mass performance of the events of the strike, with special emphasis on speeches and singing. Over this scheme a group of twenty or thirty men and women slaved day and night for several weeks, and bled their pocketbooks empty--and then saw the New York papers hinting that they had stolen the money of the strikers! Two things out of that adventure will never pass from memory: first, the old warehouse in which rehearsals were held, and John Reed with his shirt sleeves rolled up, shouting through a megaphone, drilling those who were to serve as captains of the mass; and second, the arrival of that mass, two thousand half-starved strikers in Madison Square Garden rushing for the sandwiches and coffee!

XI

The elderly Judge in Mississippi would not change his decision once given; but the ladies of the family were more pliable, and by springtime it had become plain to them that they could not break the bonds that held their daughter to the dreaded socialist muckraker. Two of them came to New York on a pilgrimage to see what sort of man it might be that had woven this evil spell. The mother was a lady who refrained from boasting of being the seventh lineal descendant of that Lady Southworth who had come to Massachusetts to marry the second colonial governor; but who allowed herself a modest pride as founder of the Christian (Disciples) church of her home town and sponsor of no one knew how many monuments to Confederate heroes throughout the South. With her came a greataunt, one of the few “strong-minded women” the state of Mississippi had produced; she had gone to California, and become a schoolteacher, and married a pioneer, General Green, who was known as the “father of irrigation” and had left her a newspaper, the Colusa _Sun_, to manage.

These two reached New York in a state of trepidation hardly to be comprehended by irreverent intellectuals. Oh, fortunate chance that the socialist muckraker had been born close to Mason and Dixon’s line, and had so many Virginia ancestors he could talk about! Actually, there were cousins who were cousins of cousins! His mother had taught him exactly how to use a knife and fork; his bride-to-be had taught him that gloves do not go with tennis shoes! For these reasons, plus a lawyer’s assurance that the divorce was valid in the United States, it was decided that there should be a wedding.

But surely not in New York, swarming place of reporters! Let it be in some decent part of the world, where family and good breeding count! Mississippi was impossible, because the Judge forbade it; but in Virginia there were cousins who would lend the shelter of their name and homestead. So the party took a night train--one amused but attentive muckraker and three Southern ladies on the verge of a nervous crisis, seeing a newspaper reporter in every sleeping-car berth. “Oh, the reporters! What will the reporters say!” Thyrsis heard this for a week, until he could stand it no more and suddenly exploded in a masculine cry: “Oh, _damn_ the reporters!” There followed an awe-stricken silence--but in their secret hearts the two elderly ladies were relieved. It was a real man, after all!

Fredericksburg, scene of the slaughter of some fifteen thousand Yankees. The old-maid cousins knew Craig, because she had been sent to them to recuperate after dancing seasons; they now welcomed this romantic expedition with open arms. There was a tremendous scurrying about, and the respectable mother set out to persuade the pastor of her respectable kind of church to officiate. But, alas, that dread stigma of a divorce! Thyrsis had to seek out an Episcopal clergyman and persuade him. Having been brought up in that church, he knew how to talk to such a clergyman; having been the innocent party in the divorce, he had under the church law the right to be remarried.

But the clergyman required evidence that Thyrsis had been the innocent party; so the would-be bridegroom came back to the hotel to get the divorce certificate. As it happened, in the hurry of packing, the proper document had been overlooked; instead, there was another and subsequent document, giving Thyrsis the custody of his son. It was in the Dutch language, and the author, who was no Dutchman, took it and translated it, with the elderly clergyman looking over his shoulder. Somehow the legal formulas became confused, and a certificate of custody underwent a mysterious transmogrification--it became a certificate of divorce based on the wife’s admitted infidelity.

The Episcopal proprieties having thus been satisfied, the clergyman put on his glad robes, and there was a ceremony in an ancient family garden by the banks of the swiftly flowing Rappahannock, with the odor of violets and crocuses in the air, and a mother and a greataunt and several old-maid cousins standing by in a state of uncertain romance. As for the bride and groom--the world had battered them too much, and they could hardly squeeze out a tear or a smile. Thyrsis had even forgotten the ring, and with sudden tears his mother-in-law slipped her own wedding ring from her finger into his hand. Apart from this lapse, and the single “damn,” he played his part perfectly. He promised to love, honor, and obey--and did so for a total of forty-eight years thereafter.

At home in Mississippi sat the elderly Judge, having been forewarned of the event and waiting for the storm to break. The telephone rang: the Memphis _Commercial Appeal_--or perhaps it was the New Orleans _Times-Picayune_. “Judge Kimbrough, we have a dispatch from Fredericksburg, Virginia, saying that your daughter has married Upton Sinclair.” “Yes, so I understand.” “The dispatch says that the husband is an advocate of socialism, feminism, and birth control. Does your daughter share her husband’s ideas on these matters?” Said the Judge: “My daughter does not share _any_ of her husband’s ideas!” And so the interview went out to the world.

_9_

_New Beginning_

I

The fates who deal out marriages seldom chose two more different human personalities for yoking together. Craig was all caution and I was all venture. She was all reticence, and I wanted to tell of my mistakes so that others could learn to avoid them. Craig would have died before she let anyone know hers. When she got some money she wanted to hide it like a squirrel; when I got some I wanted to start another crusade, to change a world that seemed to me in such sad shape. Craig agreed about the shape, but what she wanted to do was to hide us from it. This duel was destined to last for forty-eight years.

My mother and hers had proudly produced their family trees, and behold, we were both descended from the same English king. We had traveled by different routes: Craig’s ancestor, Lady Southworth, had come to Massachusetts to be married to the colonial governor, William Bradford; mine had come to Virginia and entered the Navy. One of my ancestors had been a commander in the Battle of Lake Huron in the War of 1812, and his son, Captain Arthur Sinclair, my grandfather, had commanded one of the vessels with which Admiral Perry opened up Japan. That grandfather, three uncles, and several cousins had fought in the Confederate States Navy. Craig’s great-grandfather had been appointed by President Jefferson the first surveyor general of the Territory of Mississippi. So those two mothers had got along conversationally, and Mama Kimbrough had good news to take back to Leflore County.

The youngest Kimbrough daughter, Dolly, was at a school in Tarrytown, on the Hudson, and I escorted Mama Kimbrough there. On the way she set out to make a Christian out of me, and I was so attentive that we went an hour past our station; we had to get out and wait for a train to take us back. We found Dolly in bed, blooming in spite of an appendix operation. By the time we returned to New York I had been able to persuade Mama that my socialism was just Christian brotherhood brought up to date; also Mama had decided that a trip to Europe with Craig and me would be educational for Dolly.

II

The first place we visited was Hellerau, in Germany, where the Dalcroze School was holding its annual spring festival. Hellerau means “bright meadow.” Rising from that meadow was a temple of art, and we witnessed a performance of Gluck’s _Orpheus_, represented in dance as well as in music. It was one of the loveliest things I had ever seen, and a quarter of a century later I used it for the opening scene of _Worlds End_--the world’s beginning of Lanny Budd. The young Lanny met on the bright meadow--as we ourselves had met--Bernard Shaw with his golden beard outshining any landscape. I had already had lunch at his home in London and at his country home; he welcomed us, and our joy in the Dalcroze festival was confirmed by Britain’s greatest stage critic. He was always so kind, and the letters he wrote me about the Lanny Budd books helped them to win translation into a score of foreign languages.

We traveled to David’s school and collected him. We had lunch in a restaurant in Dresden. I ordered an omelet in my most polished German, and very carefully specified that I did not want pancakes. “_Kein Mehl_,” I said several times, but they brought us pancakes; when we refused to accept them and tried to leave the restaurant, they would not let us out. Our train was due so we had to pay, and I bade an unloving farewell to Germany--just a year before World War I.

We went to Paris, and there rented an apartment for a couple of weeks. When we were ready to pay our bill, the proprietress pulled a rug from under the bed and accused us of having spilled grease on it. We had had no grease, and hadn’t even seen the rug; but when we refused to pay for the damage, the woman called in a policeman--I think he was the tallest man I ever saw in uniform. He told us we would have to pay or we could not leave. It was a “racket,” of course, but there was nothing we could do; so to France also we bade an unloving farewell. When World War I came, we weren’t quite sure which person we wanted most to have punished--the German restaurant proprietor or the French virago and tall policeman.

III

We went to England, where nobody ever robbed us. We settled in the model village of Letchworth, built by co-operatives. I had acquired from Mrs. Bernard Shaw the right to make a novel out of a drama by the French playwright Eugène Brieux, called _Damaged Goods_, dealing with venereal disease. I wrote that novel and got an advance from the publisher, and so we had a pleasant summer. I played tennis at the club, and in a middle-aged bachelor girl found the first female antagonist who could keep me busy. I have forgotten her name, but I remember that whenever I got in a good shot she would exclaim, “Oh, _haught_!”

Also I remember an outdoor socialist meeting at which I addressed an audience of co-operators, speaking from the tail of a cart along with dear, kind George Lansbury, member of Parliament and leader of the left-wing socialists.

We moved into London for a while, and there the lady from the Mississippi Delta met more strange kinds of people--among them Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, Sylvia Pankhurst, and other suffrage combatants. Craig’s sister Dolly had met them too, and we learned, somewhat to our dismay, that Dolly had carried into the National Art Gallery a hatchet concealed under her skirt. Known suffragettes, when they tried to go in, were searched; but the guards didn’t know Dolly, and it was a simple matter for her to retire to the ladies’ room and pass the hatchet. What would Chancellor Kimbrough, president of two banks in Mississippi, have said if a newspaper reporter had called him up and told him that his youngest daughter had been arrested for passing a hatchet!

While I renewed my acquaintance with my socialist friends, it was Craig’s pleasure to go out on the streets and watch the people. At home the servants had been black; here they had white skins but even so were like another race. The educated classes were gracious and keen-minded; but the poor seemed to be speaking a strange language. What did “Kew” mean? Every shop assistant said it when you handed her money; and once when Craig and I were going down into “the Tube,” two male creatures rushed past us in the midst of a hot argument. We caught one shouted sentence, “Ow, gow an’ be a Sowshalist!”

I had a curious experience in London with Jessica Finch, who was the owner and director of a fashionable American school for young ladies, just off Fifth Avenue in New York. Her prices were staggering, and admission had to be arranged years in advance. She was an ardent suffragist and a socialist as determined as myself; she taught these two doctrines to her pupils, and when they went home for Christmas vacation, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society moved into her school to hold its annual convention.

When Craig had first met me in New York, I had taken her to one of these conventions, and she had met a youth named Walter Lippmann, founder and president of the Harvard chapter of that organization. Walter was interested now to meet a young lady from the Far South, and began at once to further his education. “What is the economic status of the Negro in Mississippi?” Craig, with her red-brown eyes twinkling, replied, “I didn’t know he had any.”

Jessica was in the habit of taking a bevy of her pupils abroad at the end of each school year, and they were all snugly ensconced in the palatial home of London’s great department-store proprietor, Harry Gordon Selfridge. Jessica laughingly assured me that she had a Rembrandt in her bedroom and that every one of the girls had a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of pictures on her walls. Jessica loved to talk, and there was plenty to talk about; the suffragettes and the British socialist movement and the prospect of a world war. It must have been two or three o’clock in the morning when we parted. Craig and I saw her several years later in New York. She was married to J. O’Hara Cosgrave, onetime editor of _Everybody’s Magazine_ and later editor of the New York _Sunday World_.

The happy summer passed. _Damaged Goods_ was coming out, and I had to be in New York. Craig’s blessed mother, much against the judgment of the Judge, allowed Dolly to stay in London to become a paying guest at the Wilshires’ and attend the Dalcroze School of Eurythmics. My David was placed in one of the progressive schools near the city.

As I have already said, Craig had written some tales of her Southern girlhood; and I had stolen them from her for a novel to be called _Sylvia_. _Damaged Goods_, both the play and novel, had filled my mind with the subject of venereal disease, something considered unmentionable in those days. I now decided to use the material from _Sylvia_ for a novel on that theme, and we settled down in a little apartment to finish it. We had long arguments of course. Craig was herself Sylvia, and she thought she knew what Sylvia would do and say. I had to agree; but I thought I knew what the public would want to read. If anybody had been in the next room while we were arguing they would surely have thought that World War I had already broken out.

IV

We decided to transfer the battleground to Bermuda for the winter. We found one of those little white cottages built of blocks carved out from coral. Craig had had enough of social life to last all her days, she said; all she wanted was to sit in the shade of a palm tree and decide what she believed about life. In the afternoon I would mount a bicycle and ride down to the Princess Hotel and play tennis with a captain of the British Army, stationed nearby.

A former young woman secretary of mine had married a Bermuda planter, and they would come for us in a carriage--no autos permitted in those days--and take us to a home completely surrounded by onions and potatoes. At night the planter took me out on Harrington Sound in a flat-bottomed boat; holding a torch we would look into the clear water, and there would be a big green lobster waiting to be stabbed with a two-pronged spear.

It was in Bermuda that we had an experience Craig delighted to tell about. Walking along the lovely white coral road, we stopped at a little store to buy something to eat. Looking up, my eyes were caught by familiar objects on shelves near the ceiling--flat cans covered with dust but with the labels still visible: “Armour’s Roast Beef.” “What are those cans doing up there?” I asked, and the proprietor replied, “Oh, some years ago a fellow wrote a book about that stuff, and I haven’t been able to sell a can since.”

V

In the spring of 1914 we came back to New York. The novel, which we called _Sylvia’s Marriage_, was finished: the story of a Southern girl who marries a wealthy Bostonian and Harvard man and bears a child blinded by gonorrhea. A terrible story, of course, and an innovation in the fiction of that time. I took the manuscript to Walter Lippmann, who had himself graduated from Harvard and had founded a branch of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society there. He read it, and invited me to lunch at the Harvard Club.

I remember vividly his reaction to my novel. I hadn’t thought of him as an ardent partisan of Harvard, but perhaps he was already coming to a more conservative attitude to life. He told me that my picture of a Harvard man was utterly fantastic; no such pretentious snob had ever been seen there, and my portrait was a travesty. I remember one sentence: “It’s as preposterous as if you were to portray an orgy in this place.” And Walter waved his hand to indicate that most decorous dining room.

I would have been embarrassed had I not known certain facts that, unfortunately, I was not at liberty to mention to my old ISS friend. I thanked him for his kindness, took my departure, and have not met him since.

It was Mary Craig who had provided me with the picture of that august Harvard senior, named Van Tuiver in the novel. What had happened was this. In my little cottage in the single-tax colony of Arden, Craig had met a patron of the colony, a leading paper manufacturer, Fiske Warren. When I left Arden, my secretary, Ellen, had become one of the secretaries to this extremely wealthy and important Bostonian. On his country estate each of his secretaries had a separate cottage of her own, and Ellen had invited Craig to pay her a visit in her cottage. Craig had done so, and Fiske had dropped in now and then in the evening to chat with Craig. He did not invite her to the mansion, and Craig was shrewd enough to guess why and proud enough to be amused. Fiske’s wife, Gretchen Warren, was the most august and haughty leader of Boston society, and was not accustomed to receive secretaries socially--or friends of secretaries.

To spare too many details: Craig happened to mention that she was a lineal descendant of that Lady Southworth who had come to Massachusetts to marry Governor Bradford. Fiske went up into the air as if she had put a torpedo under him. He hurried to confirm it in his genealogy books, and then to tell Gretchen about it--with the result that Ellen lost her guest and Craig was moved up to the “big house” (I use the phrase to which Craig was accustomed in Mississippi).

So it had come about that she had met “Van Tuiver”--only of course that was not his real name. Gretchen had invited the top clubmen of eligible age to meet this Southern belle, and Craig had listened to their magnificence. Of course, she was no longer “eligible,” being engaged to me, but she was not at liberty to reveal that fact; and she let them spread their glory before her. She had never met this particular kind of arrogance and self-importance, in Mississippi or anywhere else.

So when she came back from the visit she gave me Van Tuiver as a character for our book, with every detail of his appearance, his manner, and his language. And so it was that I was not disturbed by the opinion of Walter Lippmann. Walter’s chances of meeting such a man at Harvard had been of the slimmest, for Walter suffered not merely from the handicap of being Jewish but also from having declassed himself by setting up a socialist society. (Never have I forgotten the tone of voice in which the secretary of the Harvard Club answered me when I asked if I could obtain a list of Harvard students in order to send them a circular about the proposed Intercollegiate Socialist Society. “_Socialist!_” he exclaimed, incredulously; and I got the list elsewhere.)

VI

In New York we had found ourselves a ten-dollar-a-week apartment on Morningside Heights. One evening I went to a meeting at Carnegie Hall alone; Craig, being tired, preferred to sleep. I came back about midnight; and after that she had little sleep, because I told her about the meeting.

Mrs. Laura Cannon, wife of the president of the Western Federation of Miners, had told the story of what came to be known to the world as the Ludlow massacre. In the lonely Rocky Mountains were coal camps fenced in and guarded like medieval fortresses. No one could enter without a pass or leave without another, and the miners and their families were in effect white slaves. Rebelling against such conditions, they had gone on strike and had been turned out of the camps. Down in the valley, with the help of their unions, they had set up tent colonies; after they had held out for several months, the gunmen of the company had come one night, thrown kerosene on the tents, and set fire to them. Three women and eleven children had been burned to death; but the newspapers of the country, including those of New York, had given only an inch or two to the event.

The most important fact about the whole thing was that these coal camps were owned by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, a Rockefeller concern. I told my terrified wife what I had decided to do--to take Mrs. Cannon to the office of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., in the morning and ask him to hear her story. If he refused, we would charge him with murder before the American public and organize a group of sympathizers who would put mourning bands around their arms and walk up and down in front of the Standard Oil Building in protest against the company’s crime.

I won’t try to portray the dismay of my bride of just one year. We had been so perfectly happy and so carefully respectable--and now this horror! “You will all be arrested,” she exclaimed. I answered, “Maybe, but they couldn’t do anything but fine us, and someone will put up the money.” We didn’t have it.

Craig couldn’t bring herself to say no--not this time. In the morning I set to work to call people who had been at the meeting, and put them to work to call others to the Liberal Club that evening. And, of course, we did not fail to notify the newspapers. Some thirty or forty people assembled--having scented publicity, which “radicals” dearly love. I set forth the proposal and called for the help of those who would agree to a program of complete silence and complete nonresistance. One man, overcome with indignation, called for a program of collecting arms, and I invited him to go into the next room, shut the door, and collect all the arms he wanted.

Craig was willing to be one of the marchers but insisted that she had to have a proper costume. She waited until the department stores opened, and then she got herself an elegant long white cape. When I arrived at nine in the morning, I found no men but four ladies, one of whom had provided herself with a many-colored banner and a loud screaming voice. I invited her to set the banner against the wall of the Standard Oil Company and to stuff her handkerchief in her mouth; we then took up our silent parade in front of the office of Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (We never saw him, and I learned that he had taken up the practice of coming in by a back door.)

VII

We walked for perhaps five minutes, and then policemen politely told us to walk somewhere else; when we politely refused, they told us that we were under arrest. One of them grabbed me by the arm and started to hustle me, but I said to him very quietly, “Please behave like a gentleman. I have no idea but to go with you.” So after that we had a pleasant stroll to the police station, where we found a half-dozen newspaper reporters with their pads of scratch paper and their busy pens.

To the sergeant at the desk I told the story of the Ludlow massacre all over again. It wasn’t his business to listen, but it was the reporters’ business, and all police sergeants are respectful to reporters. A little later we were put into a patrol wagon and taken to the police court, and again I told the story, this time to the judge. The policeman who had arrested me testified that my conduct had been “that of a perfect gentleman”; whereupon the judge found me guilty of disorderly conduct and fined me three dollars. I declined to pay the fine, and so did the four ladies; so each of us got three days instead of three dollars, and I was led over the “Bridge of Sighs” to a cell in the ancient prison known as The Tombs.

A most interesting experience, because I had as cellmate a young Jewish fellow in for stealing. He was a lively talker and told me all about his art; and of course every kind of knowledge is useful to a novelist sooner or later. This young fellow stole because he loved to. It was a sporting proposition--he pitted his wits against the owners of property in the great metropolis, and he didn’t especially mind when he was caught because the charge was always petty theft; apparently they never bothered to compare his fingerprints with previous fingerprints, and he was always a “first offender.” He trusted me--I suppose he thought of a socialist as an intellectual and higher type of thief. Anyhow, we were pals, and I was entertained for two days.

I never left the cell, because I had learned about fasting, and when I contemplated prison fare, I decided this was a good time to apply my knowledge. At the end of the second day a message came to me that if I wanted to appeal my sentence I would have to pay a fine; for, obviously, if I served the whole three days I could not sue to get my time back. It was my wife who had sent this information, and she set out to find the court where the one dollar for the third day was to be paid. She has told in _Southern Belle_ the delightful story of how she got lost in the several galleries of courtrooms and stopped a gentleman to ask the way to the room where the fine should be paid. The gentleman asked, “What is it for?” and Craig said, “Some idiot of a judge has sent my husband to jail.” “Madam,” was the reply, “I am that judge.” But he told her where to go to pay her dollar.

We kept that demonstration going for a couple of weeks, and Craig met such people as Judge Kimbrough’s daughter had never dreamed of meeting in this world--lumberjacks from the mountains, sailors from the harbor, and poor Jewish garment workers half-starved in a period of unemployment.

George Sterling, the poet, happened to be visiting in New York. He marched on one side of Craig, with Craig holding his arm to keep him from making any move when the “slugs” muttered insults at her. (“Slugs” was what Craig called them, groping for a word.) Clement Wood, stenographer and also poet, marched on the other side. Irish-born novelist Alexander Irvine and Irish-born suffragette Elizabeth Freeman took charge while Craig rested, and some rich supporter put up money for a rest room and feeding station. I went out to Colorado to make publicity there, and to write it; meantime Craig kept things going on lower Broadway. Clement told her that an agent of the Rockefellers had come to him and offered him money for secret information about our plans and purposes. Since we had no secrets of any sort, Craig told him to get all the Rockefeller money that was available.

VIII

A group of students of the Ferrer School, an anarchist institution, came down to march, and later decided to carry the demonstration to the Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills. They did not ask our consent, and we had nothing to do with it--until they were beaten up for trying to hold a free-speech meeting in nearby Tarrytown. Then I went up to try to persuade the board of directors of the town to let us hold a meeting; I carried with me a letter from Georg Brandes, perhaps the most highly respected literary critic in Europe--but I doubt if the trustees had heard of him. They turned down our request.

What should turn up then but an offer from a millionaire lady, whose estate adjoined the Rockefellers’, to let us hold a free-speech meeting in her open-air theater; I went there and made a speech and was not beaten up. Let would-be reformers make a note of this item and always have their free-speech meetings on the property of millionaires.

The time came when all our money was gone, and we went back to our little apartment on Morningside Heights. A day or two later our telephone rang. It was the nearby police station calling to ask Craig if she knew Arthur Caron and if she would come and identify his body. Caron was a French-Canadian boy who had been in a strike in Rhode Island and beaten there. After being beaten at Tarrytown, he and two of his colleagues had set to work in a tenement-house room to make a bomb, doubtless to blow up the Rockefellers. Instead, they had blown out the top floor of the tenement house, and two of them were killed.

I have often thought what must have been the effect of that event upon the Rockefeller family. There has been an enormous change in their attitude to the public since that time. John D., Jr., went out to his coal mines and danced with the miners’ wives and made friends with the angry old Mother Jones; more important, he made a deal to recognize the unions and reform conditions in all the camps of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. If you look at the record that his son, the present Nelson A. Rockefeller, is making as governor of New York State, you will see that our lessons were indeed learned by that family.

One curious outcome of that “civil war” of ours had to do with the newspapers. Craig had made friends with some of the reporters, and they had told her how their stories were being mutilated in the office. The New York _Herald_ gave us especially bad treatment, making many statements about us that were pure invention. For example, they said that the president of the board of trustees in Tarrytown had denounced my conduct in an angry speech. I went up to see the gentleman, to whom I had been perfectly courteous. He assured me he had made no such statement to anyone--and he gave me a letter to that effect.

That letter was shown to the _Herald_, but they refused publication and even repeated the charge; so I told a lawyer friend to bring a libel suit against them. Then I went back to my writing and forgot all about it. The usual law’s delay occurred. Some three years later, to my astonishment, I received a letter from my lawyer telling me that the case had been settled, with the _Herald_ paying three thousand dollars’ damages!

George Sterling and Clement Wood each got a fine poem out of this experience. George wandered down to the battery and gazed at the Statue of Liberty and asked,

Say, is it bale-fire in thy brazen hand, A traitor light set on betraying coast To lure to doom the mariner?...

And Clement Wood, after collecting his Rockefeller money, wrote a sonnet beginning:

White-handed lord of murderous events, Well have you guarded what your father gained....

Both these poems are in my anthology, _The Cry for Justice_, which I set out to compile as soon as the excitement of the “mourning parade” was over.

IX

We were broke as usual, but the John C. Winston Company of Philadelphia fell for my proposition of a book, _The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of Social Protest_; they advanced a thousand dollars to make possible its compilation. A good friend, Frederick C. Howe, then United States Commissioner of Immigration, offered us the use of a cottage in the hills above Croton-on-Hudson; so we moved out of our ten-dollar-a-week apartment into a fifty-dollar-a-month cottage on the edge of woods that sloped down to the Croton River. In summer the woods were green, and in winter the ground was white, and George Sterling came and chopped down dead trees for firewood. Clement Wood came to be my secretary and to quarrel with me over all the poetry I put into _The Cry for Justice_ and all that I left out--including some of his. Vachel Lindsay had come to see us in New York, and his book had set Clement on fire; we would hear him roaring through the forest:

Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo ... Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you!

Poor dear Vachel! He had been sending me his stuff for two or three years, and I had been praising it; but when I met him he suddenly burst out, to my consternation, “_Oh, you don’t like me!_” I had to persuade him that I liked him very much indeed. Clement liked him, and liked Walt Whitman too, but he didn’t like Edward Carpenter for two cents. We had fierce arguments, but in the end we got _The Cry for Justice_ put together, and it was published and widely reviewed.

Edgar Selwyn and his wife, Margaret Mayo, lived within bicycling distance, and so I had tennis. Isadora Duncan’s sister had her dancing school nearby, and we met unusual characters there. Floyd Dell and Robert Minor constituted a little radical colony, and we could go there and solve all the problems of the world, each in his own special way.

As usual, I was on the verge of making a fortune; _The Jungle_ was being made into a movie, and I went to watch the procedure in a big warehouse in Yonkers. An odd confusion there--the show was being directed by A. E. Thomas; I took this to be Augustus Thomas and named him as the director, greatly to his surprise. It was a poor picture; the concern went into bankruptcy, and so ended another dream. All I got was the film, and I loaned it to some organization and never got it back. Whoever has it, please let me know!

One incident I remember on the opening night. In the lobby of the theater I found myself being introduced to Richard Harding Davis. He had come back from some expedition and was still wearing khaki. I had read one or two of his books, and had an impression of him as a prince among snobs; but when he heard my name, he held my hand and said, “Ah, now, _you_ are a _real_ writer. I only write for money.” I never saw him again.

I saw the world war coming. I had a friend, J. G. Phelps Stokes, well known in New York as the “millionaire socialist”--you didn’t have to be more than moderately rich to receive that title. I learned that his butler was in England and about to return, so I made arrangements for the butler to bring back my son, David. I put the boy in the North Carolina school of C. Hanford Henderson, whose wise and gracious book about education I had read. That left Craig and me free, and at last there came the long-awaited letter from the Judge, inviting us “home.”

X

That meant Ashton Hall, on the Mississippi Sound near Gulfport. The family used it only in summer, and we were free to have it eight months of the year. I have a vivid memory of getting off at a little railroad stop in the backwoods: we were the only persons to descend, and there was only one person to meet us--a boy of fourteen dressed in the uniform of a military academy, a boy with gracious manners and a strong Southern brogue. Such was my first meeting with Hunter Southworth Kimbrough, who was to be our standby for almost half a century. I remember how he insisted on carrying both bags; and today I have only to go to the telephone and call him, and eight hours later he arrives from Phoenix, Arizona, ready to lift all the contents of the house on his sturdy shoulders.

We walked a quarter of a mile or so to the Gulf of Mexico, and there just beyond a sandy-beach drive stood the lovely old house, built of sound timbers before the Civil War. The front stood high above the ground, so there was room underneath to stow sailboats and even buggies. (Jefferson Davis’ buggy and his daughter’s boat were there.) We went up a wide flight of steps to what was called a gallery, which ran around three sides of the house. On it were big screened cages in which you could hide from the mosquitoes when the wind from the back marshes drove them to the front.

There was a dining room that could seat a score of persons, and two reception rooms with doors that rolled back to make a big room for dancing. Upstairs were four bedrooms, and above that a great attic with a row of beds and cots to accommodate the beaux when they came from New Orleans. That attic was haunted for Craig, because it was there the Judge had hung bunches of bananas to ripen, and Craig’s five-year-old sister had climbed up and eaten unripe bananas and died in Craig’s arms--this when Craig herself was little more than a child. The mother had been screaming to God while Craig was making the child vomit; but neither effort helped.

There was “Aunt” Catherine, whom I had been hearing about ever since I had met Craig, a half-dozen years previously. Aunt Catherine--all the older Negroes were “Aunt” or “Uncle”--was an ex-slave and happy to tell about “dem days.” “Dey wormed us all,” she said, “wormed us all good.” Which sounded alarming but merely meant the giving of worm medicine. Aunt Catherine’s happiness was to fix elaborate meals, and her distress was great when she discovered that I did not want them. She took to wandering off down the beach, visiting the servants in other beach homes. She was elegant in the castoff clothing of Craig’s mother and sisters, and I remember her coming down the beach with the wind blowing half-a-dozen colored scarves in front of her. When Craig rebuked her for neglecting her duties, the answer was, “But, Miss Ma’y, _somebody_ gotta keep up de repitation of de family--_you_ won’t do it.”

XI

Hunter, in the course of his explorations in Gulfport, picked up a sailor on liberty from one of the ships. He brought the man to the house to cut firewood and perform other labors. He was a Norwegian, a good fellow, and we put him up in one of the rooms in a back building, where the cooking was done and where the Negroes slept on the second floor. Gus, as his name was, quarreled with Catherine, who had contempt for any white man in the position of servant. She neglected to prepare his breakfast early, and Gus burst into her room to scold her. Catherine came to Craig, weeping wildly, “Oh, Miss Ma’y, I done seed a naked white man--never befo’ in my life I seed a naked white man!”

The great thing in Craig’s life now was the impending visit of her father. Her heart was in her mouth when I came up the steps after a walk, and the Judge was there. We shook hands, he bade me welcome, and I thanked him for the most precious gift I had ever received. He had hated to give it, of course, but all the same I had it, and for keeps. After a little talk I went into the house, and Craig said, “Well, Papa, what do you think of him?” The answer was, “I guess I overspoke myself.” Craig told me afterward it was the first time in her life she had heard him make any sort of apology.

He was six feet four, with a little white beard. He was a judge of the Chancery Court, which means that he handled estates and was happy in his duty of protecting the property of widows. Also, he traveled a “circuit” and presided at court in four counties, where he was famous for his way of handling the Negroes who got into trouble. He could be very stern, but he also had a keen sense of humor and knew there was nothing the Negroes dreaded more than to be laughed at. He would propose penalties that would make the audience roar, such as making two husky men who had been fighting kiss each other and make up.

But for good Negroes he had only kindness and understanding. He owned plantations and lands, and some of his land was worked by trusted Negroes on shares. They would come to see him and tell him their needs, and he would sit on the back porch and chat with them, being interested in their minds. He would tell funny stories about them, but he gave serious advice and help when needed. On Christmas Day they all came to have their “dram,” and in the evening when there were parties some would play music and be as happy as the dancers.

But don’t think that he couldn’t be stern, for he had to be. Dreadful things happened. A Negro woman, furious with jealousy, poured boiling grease into her sleeping husband’s ear; a woman nurse, jealous of a rival for the position, set fire to the curtains on the balcony where the white children were sleeping. Craig told the story of a Negro meeting in the woods back of her Greenwood home. A fight broke out in the night, and the Judge grabbed his shotgun and rushed out; Mama Kimbrough grabbed his rifle and followed behind--to protect her big six-foot-four husband. He didn’t want to shoot any of the Negroes because they were “his.” He just waded in, using his shotgun as a club, and scattered them and drove them to their cabins. Such was life on a Mississippi plantation when Craig was a child, three quarters of a century ago. The sight of bleeding Negroes was familiar to her from the beginning of her life, and once she helped to sew on a torn ear.

XII

My aim that winter was to write a novel called _King Coal_, dealing with those labor camps in the Rocky Mountains about which I had learned so much. The first essential for my work was quiet, and the way to get it was to have a tent at a corner of the property remote from the house. A tent must have a platform, so I ordered the necessary lumber and set to work. Nobody at Ashton Hall, white or black, had ever seen a white “gentleman” doing such work, and I damaged my reputation thereby. A colored boy helped me to get the tent up, since that couldn’t be done alone. I built a little doorframe for the front and tacked on mosquito netting.

Thereafter, when the wind brought mosquitoes, my technique was as follows: I would dart out from the big house, run as fast as my feet could take me to the tent, brush off the mosquitoes that had already attached themselves, dart inside and fasten the door, then with a flyswat proceed to eliminate all the mosquitoes inside. The size of the tent was eight by ten; so I had three steps east and then three steps west while I thought up the next scene in my story. I would sit down and write for a while on the typewriter, then get up and walk and think some more. So, in the end I had _King Coal_.

The Judge came from Greenwood now and then and took me fishing--always with a Negro man to row the boat and bait our hooks. Brother Willie Kimbrough came, a big laughing stout man, and took me to catch pompano in what was called Back Bay, a sort of deep sound.

Craig’s sister Dolly, back from England, came to stay with us; Craig, who disapproved of idleness, assigned her a job. Behind the house stood an enormous arbor of scuppernong grapes, loaded with ripe fruit that it would be a shame to waste. So Dolly put two Negro boys to picking grapes. When they had two big baskets full, they would take them to the trolley, and Dolly would ride into town and arrange with a grocery to buy them. Never before had an occupant of Ashton Hall engaged in trade, and Dolly wept once or twice, then became interested in making pocket money.

Everything was going beautifully, and if it went wrong there was someone to attend to it. I made the mistake of leaving my small possessions, such as fountain pen and cuff links, on my bureau, and one by one these objects disappeared. After searching everywhere I mentioned the matter to the youthful Hunter, who knew exactly what to do. He called a Negro boy, one of the house servants, and said with due sternness, “Empty your pockets.” Sure enough, the boy proceeded to shell out all my possessions. Hunter didn’t say, “I’ll call the police.” He said, “Now, you keep out of Mr. Sinclair’s room; if I ever hear of you being in there again, I’ll skin you alive.” Such was “gov’ment” on the Mississippi Sound. I don’t know how it is now, but I am able to understand both sides in the racial problem.

XIII

Visitors came to see us--among them Captain Jones. I don’t know that I ever heard his first name, but that wasn’t necessary as there was only one “Captain Jones” in that world. He had built the Gulfport harbor, also the railroad that connected Gulfport with the North, and also the trolley line that paralleled the road in front of Ashton Hall and carried me into town when I wanted to play tennis at Captain Jones’s Great Southern Hotel.

The old gentleman and his wife came to Ashton Hall, and he poured out his heart to us. He was probably the richest man in Mississippi; but nobody loved him, nobody wanted anything but money from him, and some of their ways were wicked and cruel. His railroad, which ran through the desolate “piney woods” of southern Mississippi, was a blessing to everybody along the way; but the miserable piney-woods people, “clayeaters” as they were called, had only one thought--to plunder Captain Jones’s railroad. They would cut the wire fence that protected both sides of the track and turn some scrawny old cow onto the railroad right of way; when the creature was struck and killed by a train, they would demand the price of a prize bull in a cattle show.

I was duly sympathetic, of course, and was somewhat embarrassed when a strike of the dockworkers developed in Captain Jones’s Gulfport. He had made all the prosperity of that town, and here was one more case of ingratitude. It was embarrassing to me and to the Kimbrough family when the strikers sent a deputation to ask me to speak at a meeting in the largest hall in Gulfport. I had never refused an invitation from strikers, and I wasn’t going to begin at the age of thirty-six. I told them I couldn’t discuss their particular issues because I didn’t know the circumstances and didn’t have time to investigate them; but I would tell them my ideas of democracy in industry, otherwise known as socialism, where strikes would be unnecessary because workers would be striking against themselves.

The meeting was duly announced, and the Kimbrough family were too polite to tell me what they thought about the matter. What the wife of Captain Jones thought about it surprised both Craig and me. She called us up and said she would be glad to go to the meeting with us; and would we come to the Great Southern Hotel and have dinner with her before the meeting? Of course we said we would be pleased.

It was Craig’s practice to sit in the very back of a hall, where she would be inconspicuous and if possible unrecognized. But Mrs. Jones wouldn’t have it that way. She took me by an arm and Craig by an arm, and marched us straight down the center aisle to the front seats in the hall so that everybody would know who had brought us. I have had a number of experiences like that with the very rich, and they have encouraged me to realize that democracy is a real force in America.

XIV

So everything seemed lovely at Ashton Hall, until one tragic day when the roof fell in on us--the moral and spiritual roof. My former wife saw fit to come to Gulfport and bring a lawsuit for the custody of our son. I cannot shirk the telling of this story because it played an enormous

## part in my life and Craig’s; but I tell it as briefly and tactfully as

possible. I don’t think the lady actually wanted David, but the grandmother did. My former wife is still living, has been married twice, and has children and grandchildren whom I have no desire to hurt. Suffice it to say that her coming created a scandal in Gulfport--one that not even the wife of Captain Jones could mitigate.

David was with us at the time, and I had a secretary, a young man from the North, who considered it a great lark to carry the lad off into the woods and hide him from the courts of Mississippi for a few days. There was a trial with plenty of publicity; the court, presided over by a Catholic judge, awarded six months’ custody to me and six months’ to his mother. To make the painful story short, I took David to California for the first six months; and when the time came for his mother to come and get him, I heard nothing from her--then or afterward.

Judge Kimbrough had made Craig an offer promising her Ashton Hall if she would live there. It was said to be worth a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and with the development that has come in the past thirty or forty years, the lot alone is probably worth that now. But we couldn’t be happy there. A friend had told me about the wonders of southern California, where there were no mosquitoes. I begged Craig to come, and I went ahead to find a home.

_10_

_West to California_

I

It was November of 1915. I wanted to be warm so I went as far south as possible, to Coronado; but it proved not to be so warm. Cold winds blew off the wide Pacific, and the little cottage I rented leaked both wind and rain. I pasted newspapers inside to keep out the wind--which was not very ornamental.

Craig was wretchedly unhappy over the humiliation she had brought to her family, and only time could heal that wound. She told me long afterward that she hadn’t been sure she would follow me to California; but her father, who had labored so hard to keep us apart, now kept us together. He said, “Daughter, you must go to your husband.” She came, and we had a hard time because George P. Brett of Macmillan rejected _King Coal_. It was a painful, a terrible subject, and I had failed to make the characters convincing. Craig, who agreed with him, wrote to him telling him her ideas and offering to make me revise the manuscript accordingly. Brett said he would read the manuscript again after she had finished.

You can imagine what a hold that gave her in our family arguments. The heroine of my story was a daughter of the mining camps named Mary Burke. I had failed to describe what she looked like; Craig sought in vain to find out from me, because I didn’t know. Likewise, Craig insisted that Mary Burke was naked, and thereafter for the rest of our lives the revision of my manuscripts was known as “putting the clothes on Mary Burke.”

Anybody who heard us in that little leaky cottage would have been quite sure we were getting ready for a divorce; but we made an agreement about all our quarrels--whenever one of us got too excited, the other would say “Manuscript,” and the excitement would diminish.

When the rains stopped, I would go out and meet the idle rich, playing tennis on the courts of the immense and fashionable Coronado Hotel. Craig would never go; she had met enough rich people to last her the rest of her life. But I had to have characters as well as tennis, and I watched the characters playing at polo and other expensive diversions. I wrote a novel about some of these people that has never yet been published--Craig never got around to putting clothes on the characters.

As far as I can recall we had only one visitor that entire winter. Jane Addams wrote that she wanted to see me, and I was surprised and pleased. I had seen a good deal of her in Chicago because I had had my meals at the University Settlement all the time I was getting material for _The Jungle_. What she had come for now was to ask me about Emanuel Julius. Her niece, Marcet Haldeman, had become engaged to marry him, and what sort of man was he? He was editor of the _Appeal to Reason_ and had been the means of making _The Jungle_ known to the American masses. I am not sure whether I had met him at that time, but I could say that he had a brilliant mind and was, like myself, an ardent socialist.

I may as well complete the story here by saying that the marriage took place; and that after the tragic death of J. A. Wayland, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius bought the _Appeal to Reason_ with his wife’s money and built up a great publishing business, including many hundreds of titles of the five-cent Little Blue Books that did so much to educate America. But, alas, Julius took up with a secretary, and Marcet divorced him. Julius drowned in his swimming pool, and no one knows whether it was a suicide. The good Jane Addams did not live to see these painful events. A son survives, a good friend.

II

We decided that we wanted to get away from ocean winds; and I had met a tennis professional who lived in Pasadena and who assured me I would find plenty of tennis there. So we made the move and found ourselves a brown-painted, two-story house on Sunset Avenue, a remote part of the town. It was covered with a huge vine of red roses, and roses were as important to Craig as tennis was to me.

The house stood on the edge of a slope, with the valley of the Arroyo Seco to the west. It was unfurnished, so Craig would walk several blocks to the streetcar, ride a couple of miles downtown, and then wander about looking for secondhand furniture shops. That way she got three chairs with ragged upholstery for our living room, two beds for upstairs, and packing boxes for tables and bureaus. We were able to do all those things because Brett had accepted _King Coal_ and paid a five-hundred-dollar advance. After that magical achievement, Craig was boss of the family.

Pasadena in the year 1916 was a small town that called itself “City of Roses” and was called by others “City of Millionaires.” These last occupied the wide, elegant Orange Grove Avenue, with palaces on both sides and two very elegant hotels for the winter visitors. We had no thought of the rich, and never expected them to have any thought of us in our humble brown cottage overlooking the sunset. The beautiful roses and the sunsets were enough for Craig, and as for me, I had started _The Coal War_, a sequel to _King Coal_, with more about Mary Burke and her clothes. I had learned now!

But wherever there are millionaires there are also socialists--they are cause and effect. The socialists came to see me and invited me to speak at a meeting in support of a proposed co-operative; of course I went. I had found a woman secretary to type my manuscripts--another necessity of my life--and in the course of the evening this lady came to my wife and whispered a portentous sentence: “Mrs. Gartz wants to meet you.”

“Who is Mrs. Gartz?” asked Craig; and the awe-stricken secretary replied, “Oh, my dear, she is the richest woman in Pasadena.”

Craig said, “Well, bring her here.”

The secretary, dismayed, responded, “She said for you to come to her.”

The secretary didn’t know Craig very well, but she learned about her right there. “If she wants to meet me,” said Craig, “she will come to me.” And that was that.

When the meeting was over, the secretary came back, and with her was a large, magnificent lady of the kind that Craig had known all through her girlhood. The lady was introduced; and, of course, she knew another lady when she met one. More especially, she knew a lovely Southern voice and manner; so she asked if she might come to see us, and Craig said that she might. Craig made no apology for her living room that had only three ragged chairs in it--the biggest one for the large rich lady and the other two for Craig and myself.

Mrs. Kate Crane-Gartz was the elder daughter of Charles R. Crane, plumbing magnate of Chicago, dead then for several years. He had been a newspaper celebrity, not only because he was one of the richest men in America but because he differed from most rich men in being talkative and in voicing original opinions. He was particularly down on college education, insisting that it was all wasteful nonsense. He hadn’t had one himself, and look where he had got!

Mrs. Gartz was an elegant lady with a haughty manner and a tender heart. She had had many sorrows, which we learned about in the course of time. She had lost two of her children in a theater fire in Chicago. She still had a son and a daughter, both of whom she adored, but they gave her little happiness. She had a soft heart and an overfull purse, and she was preyed upon freely--all that we learned soon. But there was one person who would never prey upon her, and that was Mary Craig Sinclair.

III

This new friend was the most curiously frank person we had ever known. She looked around at our new establishment and said, “Why do you live like this?” “We have to,” said Craig, and no more. “Don’t your husband’s books sell?” demanded the visitor. “They have sold in the past,” said Craig, “but he has spent all his money on the socialist movement. He always does that, I’m sorry to say.”

Mrs. Gartz obtained our promise to come and see her, also permission to send her car for us. Then she got into a magnificent limousine and told the uniformed chauffeur to drive her downtown to a furniture store. Early the next morning came a van, and two men unloaded a set of parlor furniture upholstered in blue velvet.

Craig said, “What is this?” One of the men said, “It was ordered. We don’t know anything about it.” Craig said, “I didn’t order it, and I don’t want it. Take it back.”

So it came about that there was one person in Pasadena whom Kate Crane-Gartz could not merely respect but could even stand a bit in awe of. There was one person she would never dare to humiliate, and one who would come to her luncheon parties wearing unfashionable clothing. So it came about that for something like a quarter of a century Mary Craig Sinclair controlled the purse strings of the richest woman in Pasadena.

The main factor in this, I think, was that for the first time in her life Mrs. Gartz met someone whom she regarded as her social equal and possibly her superior. Craig had not only the loveliest Southern voice, but also had gracious manners, wit, and what is called charm. She could keep a roomful of company in continuous laughter. Both men and women would gather around to hear what she had to say. She had taste, and could look lovely in clothes she found on a bargain counter. She had the strangest imaginable combination of haughtiness and kindness. She had a heart that bled for every kind of suffering except that which was deserved. She was a judge of character, and no pretender could ever fool her.

Most important of all, she had come with my help to understand what was wrong with the world--the social system that produces human misery faster than all the charity in the world can relieve it. She had married me partly because I had taught her that, and now she understood the world better than any person whom Kate Crane-Gartz had ever known.

For many years Craig would never take a cent from Mrs. Gartz for herself. “Give it to the co-operative. Give it to the Socialist Party.” For a while Mrs. Gartz was timid about doing that, so she would ask Craig to pass it on, which Craig faithfully did.

The “co-op” had been started by a devoted socialist woman named Tipton, who took in washing while her husband drove a delivery wagon. You can imagine that the first time Mrs. Kate Crane-Gartz showed up at one of the monthly “co-op” bean suppers at the Tipton house it was an event in the history of that City of Millionaires.

Mr. Gartz, who handled his wife’s millions, was not long unaware of these developments. He was beside himself with rage; and when for the first time his wife invited us to a supper party at the fashionable Maryland Hotel, he came into the dining room and stood behind my chair and started muttering abuse in a low tone of voice.

Craig had never had to handle a situation like that, but she was equal to all situations. She got up and invited Mr. Gartz to come over to the next table and speak to her. He obeyed, and she pointed out to him that there was only one possible conclusion the public would draw if he persisted in making a public scene with Upton Sinclair. With that terrible threat she scared him; at the same time, with her lovely Southern voice she calmed him down, and he went his way. Once or twice he raved at me in his home, but I had promised not to answer him, and I obeyed.

That situation continued for a matter of twenty years. The daughter, Gloria, sided with her father, and the son, Craney, sided with his mother. Alas, Craney drank, and when he was drinking he was very generous. To pacify him I would accept his gifts and then return them when he was sober. I once returned a Buick car.

IV

I finished _The Coal War_, a story of the great strike through which I had lived in spirit if not in physical presence; but I never published it, for world war had come and no one was interested in labor problems any more. Mrs. Gartz was a pacifist. A federal agent came to investigate her, and Craig had the job of pacifying _him_. “What I want to know is,” he said, “is she pro-German, or is she just a fool?” Craig assured him that the latter was the case.

Craney became an Air Force officer and traveled around in a blimp looking for German submarines off the Atlantic coast. I resigned from the Socialist Party in order to support the war; and Mrs. Gartz, a pacifist on her son’s account, took a lot of persuading from Craig--who, being a Southerner, had less objection to fighting. At any rate, that was true when the fighting was against the German Kaiser.

My socialist comrades called me bad names for a while, and Craig and Mrs. Gartz argued every time they met. But by that time Craig’s influence had become strong enough to keep Mrs. Gartz from getting into jail. We had a lot of fun laughing over the idea of Kitty--as I had come to call her--misbehaving in a jail. I think even Mr. Gartz appreciated what I was doing, and he no longer growled when he saw me in his home.

In 1918 I started the publication of a little socialist magazine to support the American position in the world war. I called it _Upton Sinclair’s: For a Clean Peace and the Internation_. (Later the slogan became _For Social Justice, by Peaceful Means if Possible_.) For that, Craig felt justified in letting Mrs. Gartz hand her several government bonds. It was amusing the way the great lady argued with us about what was in the magazine, and at the same time helped to keep it going. Some of my socialist and other friends argued with me. They would write me letters of protest against my supporting the war, and I would put the letters in the magazine and reply to them. The more angry the letters were, the more my readers were entertained. All my life I have had fun in controversy.

My position was, of course, to the left of the government. Indeed, Woodrow Wilson was to the left of his own government, and many of his officials didn’t understand his ideas--or disapproved of them when they did understand. When the first issue of the magazine appeared, I applied to the Post Office Department for second-class entry--which was essential, for if I had to pay first-class postage I would be bankrupt at the outset. I had sent copies of the magazine to a number of persons in Washington whom I knew or knew about; and when I got notice that the second-class entry had been refused, I telegraphed to Colonel House. He told me that he was with the President when the telegram was delivered, and he had told the President what was in the magazine and the President approved of it.

As it happened, John Sharp Williams, United States Senator from Mississippi, was Craig’s cousin; in her girlhood she had driven him over the shell roads of the Gulf Coast and learned about politics from his humorous stories. I had sent the magazine to him, of course; and now he wrote that he had read it and had taken up the matter of the second-class entry with Postmaster General Burleson, who was also a Southerner. Burleson had a copy of the magazine with the passages that he considered “subversive” marked. Williams said, “I’ll undertake to read those passages to Woodrow Wilson, and I’ll agree to eat my hat if he doesn’t approve every word of them.”

So it all worked out very nicely. My little magazine got the second-class entry, and Senator Williams of Mississippi went on wearing his hat.

I published, in all, ten issues of that little magazine. The first issue was April 1918; then I had to skip a month because of the delay with second-class entry. The last issue was February 1920. In all, I built up a subscription list of ten thousand, paid for at one dollar per year. I had five secretaries and office girls wrapping and mailing. Mrs. Gartz would come down and argue with Craig and me--she being an out-and-out pacifist. Her attitude was summed up by James Russell Lowell in two lines of verse--

Ez fer war, I call it murder-- There you hev it plain an’ flat.

--although I don’t think Mrs. Gartz had ever heard of _The Biglow Papers_.

V

Like all the other liberals, radicals, and socialists, I was bitterly disappointed by the settlement to which President Wilson consented in Paris. It seemed to us that our hopes had been betrayed, and it seemed to Mrs. Gartz that her seditious opinions had been vindicated. But nothing made any difference in our friendship, or interrupted the flow of checks to help keep the magazine going.

The checks brought one amusing development before long: the president of Pasadena’s biggest bank invited Mrs. Gartz to remove her account from his institution. Whether that had ever happened in the banking world before I do not know. Checks payable to Mary Craig Sinclair were poisonous or incendiary. I might add that in the new bank Craig deposited a thousand-dollar bond that Mrs. Gartz had brought to her personally, in return for some writing Craig had done for her. “Don’t let Mr. Sinclair get hold of it,” said Mrs. Gartz, “or he’ll spend it all on the magazine. Go down to the bank and rent a safe-deposit box and hide it away.”

Since Craig could feel that she had earned this bond, she took Mrs. Gartz’s advice. Some months later, she went down to the bank to get the bond and discovered that the box was empty. In the normal course of events she would have reported the matter to the head of the bank; but she would have had to tell him where she had got the bond, and she did not care to do that. She took the loss quietly and did not tell her too-generous friend.

While editing and publishing the magazine, I was also writing a new novel based on my experiences in the Socialist Party, of which I had been a member for a couple of decades. I had known all kinds of picturesque characters and types, and heard stories of their adventures. A Socialist Party candidate for vice president, Ben Hanford, had invented the name “Jimmie Higgins” for the humble worker in the party who makes no speeches and gets no honors but does the tiresome jobs of addressing envelopes, distributing literature, and making house-to-house calls to bring his fellow workers to meetings. I took this character for my hero, and started the publication of _Jimmie Higgins_ in the magazine.

When in 1919 our Army made its somewhat crazy landing on the shores of the Archangel Peninsula, as a start to putting down the Bolshevik movement in Russia, I decided to change the tone of my novel at the end. So far Jimmie had been a socialist patriot and had loyally gone to war; but now he turned into a malcontent, to be jailed and tortured. I recall that some reviewer in the New York _Times_ rebuked me severely for this seditious invention; but it wasn’t long afterward that the New York _Times_ itself was reporting just such incidents as having happened in the Army at Archangel. When I wrote to the _Times_ pointing out these details, my letter was ignored.

In this magazine I had all kinds of fun. I got letters of praise and letters of fury, and published them side by side. The more bad names I was called, the more amusing I found it; and my readers let me know that they too enjoyed it. I sent the magazine to well-known persons, got responses pro and con, and published them. H. G. Wells wrote a gay letter. I published it in facsimile, and somebody wrote asking me please to supply a translation. Socialists denounced me as a renegade; patriots denounced me as a traitor--and I printed the letters along with those of Colonel House, Senator John Sharp Williams, and other patriots of repute.

All this labor was wearing on my brain and my stomach, as well as my purse. Then suddenly I thought of a solution. Emanuel Haldeman-Julius had taken over the _Appeal of Reason_ and changed its name to the _Haldeman-Julius Weekly_. He had a circulation of something like half a million, whereas _Upton Sinclair’s_ had succeeded in getting only ten thousand. I was always lured by a larger audience, and I made him a proposition to merge my magazine with his. He would let me have one full page called “Upton Sinclair’s,” in which I would say what I pleased. The serial I was writing would fill part of the page, which was newspaper size, and I could supply material similar to the contents of my magazine to fill the rest of the page. So it was agreed, and instead of having a monthly deficit I would have an income of fifty dollars a week. At least it was enough to pay the secretary who was taking my dictation. Also, it was a load off the mind of my overburdened wife; and if any of my subscribers complained, I could remind them that they had never offered to pay my printer’s bill.

_11_

_The Muckrake Man_

I

For all my thinking lifetime I had been making tests of the big-business press of America. Almost everywhere it was on the side of privilege and exploitation, almost nowhere was it alert to the interest of democratic freedom. I had made notes and had envelopes full of clippings, and a head full of memories and a heart full of rage. I decided that I would put all that into a book and use the huge circulation I had got from that four-page Kansas weekly paper.

Seeking a title, I went back to the days of my youth when I had joined in the election campaign against Tammany Hall. William Travers Jerome had told about the wholesale prostitution that was protected because of graft paid to the police department. The “price of a woman’s shame” was a brass check purchased at the entrance. Jerome had based his whole campaign upon it, and it struck me that _The Brass Check_ was a fine title for a book about the prostitution of the press. I made the term known not merely to all America but to Europe as well, for the book was translated into many languages. It was a book of facts that no one could dispute, because I had saved the clippings, and I verified every story that I told.

It happened that an old friend was spending the winter in a cottage at our fashionable hotel. Samuel Untermyer, whom I had met through Lincoln Steffens, had been the highest-paid corporation lawyer in New York. Now he was an old man, tired--except for his tongue. He could tell more terrible stories of corruption than anyone I ever knew, and he had told some to me when I visited his home up the Hudson and inspected the orchids that decorated every room.

I took him the manuscript of _The Brass Check_. When he had read it, he said, “Upton, you can’t possibly publish that book. It contains a score of criminal libels and a thousand civil suits.” I said, “I am going to publish it and take the consequences.”

In Hammond, Indiana, I had found a large printing concern that had printed my book, _The Profits of Religion_, and made no objection. Now with some qualms I sent them the bulky “criminal” manuscript. To my surprise they made no comment, but quoted a price and proceeded to send me proofs.

I remember an amusing episode. The elderly treasurer of the company paid a visit to California and asked to see me. He came, and I learned to what I owed the honor. He said, very mildly, that he had recently discovered that I had run up a debt of twenty thousand dollars, and he wondered if I realized how much money that was. I told him that I had never had such a debt in my life hitherto, but that the book was selling well and the money would come in installments; and it did.

The book was published serially in the _Appeal_, and I was really surprised by the result. I had never had so many letters or so many orders. I knew that this time I had a real best seller. When I got the finished books, I gave a copy to my old friend, Gaylord Wilshire, who had made his home in Pasadena. He threw me into a panic when he phoned to tell me that it was inconceivable that the publication of this book would be permitted in America. He urged me to get all my copies distributed at once to socialist and labor groups and bookstores, and tell them to hide the books. I took this seriously and did as he suggested. It was an easy way to get rid of books, but a hard way to make money.

I had to have more paper; when I applied to the wholesalers I was told there was no paper on the market. World War I had caused a shortage of everything. The big concerns had their contracts, of course, and were getting their paper; but there was none left over for a little fellow like the author of _The Brass Check_.

I wrote to every wholesale paper dealer in the United States, but got no response. I took my lamentations into the city of Los Angeles, and there made a surprising discovery. There was a kind of paper called Kraft--otherwise known as plain brown wrapping paper. I could get it in a light weight, and it was possible to read print on it.

Nobody in the world had ever thought to print a book on it; but I got the price for a carload, six thousand dollars, and went back home and laid siege to my old friend, Sam Untermyer. I pointed out to him that I hadn’t been arrested, and I hadn’t even had a civil suit threatened; so I begged him to lend me six thousand dollars. I made him so ashamed of his misjudgment as a lawyer that he actually wrote me a check. He was quite pathetic when he told me how necessary it was that he should get it back (He did.)

The book created a tremendous sensation and, of course, no end of controversy. I won’t go into the details because the stories are old--and many of the newspapers have learned something about ethics. I venture to think that reporters all over the country read the book and took courage from it. Many of them are now editors, and while they still have to “take policy,” they don’t take it quite so completely.

I had called upon them to form a union to protect their rights, and this they promptly did--but they preferred to call it a guild, which is more aristocratic. Now the guild has branches all over the country and has had some effect in establishing standards of professional decency. While I was completing this book their New York chapter invited me to come and receive an award.

II

Next book: _The Goose-Step_. In the early spring of 1922 I left my long-suffering wife in charge of my office with an elderly secretary and three or four assistants, while I took a tour all over the United States, going first to the Northwest, then across to Chicago, New York, and Boston, then back through the Middle West and Southwest. I had been through five years of City College and four years of postgraduate work at Columbia, and had come out unaware that the modern socialist movement existed. So now I meant to muckrake the colleges, showing where they had got their money and how they were spending it. I had jotted down the names of discontented schoolteachers and college professors who had written to me, or whose cases had become known; I visited some thirty cities, and in each of them some educator had assembled the malcontents in his or her home, and I sat and made notes while they told me their angry or hilarious stories.

There were many comical episodes on my tour. The University of Wisconsin had been liberal in the days of Robert LaFollette; but now it had a reactionary president, and I had a lively time with him. I had applied for the use of a hall, and he had already announced that he wouldn’t grant it. He referred me to the board of regents, and I had a session with them. I finally got the use of the gymnasium, and the newspaper excitement brought a couple of thousand students to ask me questions for an hour after my talk. The concluding paragraph of my Wisconsin story was as follows:

Next afternoon I met the champion tennis team of the university, and played each of the pair in turn and beat them in straight sets; I was told that the student body regarded this as a far more sensational incident than my Socialist speech. An elderly professor came up to me on the campus next day--I had never seen him before, and didn’t know his name; he assured me with mock gravity that I had made a grave blunder--I should have played the tennis matches first, and made the speech second, and no building on the campus would have been big enough to hold the crowd.

From Wisconsin I went on to Chicago, to what I called the University of Standard Oil. The students had a hymn that they sang there:

Praise God from whom oil blessings flow, Praise Him, oil creatures here below, Praise Him above, Ye Heavenly Host, Praise Father, Son--but John the most.

I interviewed the president there, and he granted me the use of a small hall. When I assured him I would need a larger one, he refused to believe me; so I found myself quite literally packed in, with students climbing into the windows and sitting on the sills and standing in the corridors. Just outside the hall I had noticed a beautiful quadrangle with lovely soft grass and plenty of room. I suggested that we all move out onto the grass and that somebody find me a soapbox to stand on--the classical pulpit of radical orators. There were loud cheers, and we moved outside. Still more people came running, and I talked to the crowd for an hour or two and answered questions for an hour or two more. Everybody had a good time except the Standard Oil president.

The next day I played the tennis champion of that university, and I have to record that he beat me--but with an effort so mighty that he split his pants.

III

One of the cities was my birthplace, Baltimore, and one of my sources there was Elizabeth Gilman, daughter of the founder of Johns Hopkins University. She filled her home with professors one day and with schoolteachers the next, and they told me their troubles.

I have mentioned my friendship with Mencken. It began by mail; he was a tireless letter writer. There are some two hundred letters from him in the collection of my papers in the Lilly Library of the University of Indiana. He liked to write little short notes--he had secretaries and kept them busy. He didn’t care in the least what he said--provided only that it was funny. The more extravagant, the more fun; and the more seriously you took it, the still greater fun. When I was in New York, I called at the _American Mercury_ office, and his conversation was just like his letters.

Now he had retired, and I visited his home in Baltimore--like Uncle Bland’s, it was one of those brick houses, four stories high, apparently built a whole block at a time in solid, uniform rows, each house with three or four white marble steps up to the front door. Mencken poured out his Jovian thunderbolts for a whole afternoon. This was the longest time I had with him, and the most diverting.

Uncle Bland, as I have already related, was the founder and president of the United States Fidelity and Guaranty Company and had become one of the most important men in Baltimore--but he had never met his “Sunpaper” editor. He insisted that I invite Mencken out to Catonsville, his summer home, for dinner. For this occasion my cousin Howard Bland sent his wife and children over to the “big house,” and we four men had Howard’s dining room for the evening.

It wasn’t a pleasant occasion for me because the other three spent most of the time discussing the various brands of wines, brandies, and whiskies. Partly, of course, it was done to “kid” me. It was the time of prohibition, and Uncle Bland had a tragic experience to report. He had foreseen the trouble coming and had a large stock safely locked up in his cellar; but while he was in his town house for the winter, the cellar door was pried open, and everything was carted away in the night. Everybody but me was grieved.

I had shipped home various boxes containing documents. I came back and for several months labored and wrote _The Goose-Step_. As usual, I was warned about libel; but, as usual, it did not happen.

_The Goose-Step_, a big book, 488 pages, price two dollars, was published in 1923, and I assure you the college professors read it--and talked about it, even out loud. I could get paper this time, and filled all the orders, some twenty thousand copies. Then I wrote _The Goslings_, 454 pages, price two dollars, telling about schools of all sorts; the teachers read it, and many had the courage to write to me. I had given them weapons to fight with, or perhaps lanterns to light with; anyhow, I have seen changes in America, and I tell myself I have helped a little to bring them about.

IV

It was in that period that the American Civil Liberties Union was started; I joined at once, and attended weekly luncheons of its directors when I was in New York. Whether we had supported the war or opposed it, we all supported our right to say what we thought and our willingness to let the other fellow do the same. Among those I knew best were Roger Baldwin, who became a civil-liberties hero and devoted his life to the cause; Oswald Garrison Villard, publisher of _The Nation_, who remained a pacifist even in the face of Kaiser Wilhelm; and B. W. Huebsch, then a publisher on his own, and later editorial head of Viking Press; he was my guide and mentor through the eleven Lanny Budd volumes, about which I shall tell.

Also, there was W. J. Ghent, author of _Our Benevolent Feudalism_. He and I got into an argument over the war in the columns of _The Nation_. The argument got too hot for Villard, and he wouldn’t publish my reply; so I paid for a page advertisement in _The Nation_ and had my say. I remember Ghent’s published comment: “Sinclair has taken the argument into the advertising columns, where I am unable to follow.” After that, I was summoned to a luncheon with Villard and Huebsch and very gently asked to call off the war--that is, the Ghent War.

Not long afterward came the founding of the Southern California branch of the ACLU, a drama in which I had the leading role. It began when I tried to read the Constitution of the United States at a meeting on private property that had been organized on behalf of workers who were on strike at San Pedro Harbor. I was arrested after the third sentence. When I got out of jail, I wrote a letter to Louis D. Oaks, chief of police in Los Angeles. It was printed as a leaflet and widely circulated in Los Angeles. It was also printed in _The Nation_ of June 6, 1923, along with an editorial note. I’m going to reprint that page from _The Nation_, partly because it tells the story, but mainly because it conveys so vividly the atmosphere of that period and the repression and brutality that went on then--which a new generation might find hard to credit.

In refusing to bow to the police of Los Angeles, who in the harbor strike have been the servile tools of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association, Upton Sinclair is strictly and legally a defender of the law against those who would violate it. And it is doubly to his praise that in this case he, a civilian, happens to be defending the law against the men who are sworn and paid to uphold it and have all the power of constituted authority on their side. The facts are undisputed: the police arrested Mr. Sinclair and his associates on _private property_, where they had assembled with the written consent of the owner. The law gives a police officer the right to enter private property only in two cases: if he has a warrant of arrest, or if a felony is actually being committed. Neither of these excuses existed in Los Angeles. The persons interfered with would have been legally justified in dealing with the police as violently as with a thief or kidnapper. We print below Mr. Sinclair’s letter to the chief of police of Los Angeles because it is a recital of facts which our readers should know and a nobly patriotic protest which should have their support.

_Pasadena, California, May 17, 1923_

LOUIS D. OAKS,

Chief of Police, Los Angeles

Having escaped from your clutches yesterday afternoon, owing to the fact that one of your men betrayed your plot to my wife, I am now in position to answer your formal statement to the public, that I am “more dangerous than 4,000 I.W.W.” I thank you for this compliment, for to be dangerous to lawbreakers in office such as yourself is the highest duty that a citizen of this community can perform.

In the presence of seven witnesses I obtained from Mayor Cryer on Tuesday afternoon the promise that the police would respect my constitutional rights at San Pedro, and that I would not be molested unless I incited to violence. But when I came to you, I learned that you had taken over the mayor’s office at the Harbor. Now, from your signed statement to the press, I learn that you have taken over the district attorney’s office also; for you tell the public: “I will prosecute Sinclair with all the vigor at my command, and upon his conviction I will demand a jail sentence with hard labor.” And you then sent your men to swear to a complaint charging me with “discussing, arguing, orating, and debating certain thoughts and theories, which thoughts and theories were contemptuous of the constitution of the State of California, calculated to cause hatred and contempt of the government of the United States of America, and which thoughts and theories were detrimental and in opposition to the orderly conduct of affairs of business, affecting the rights of private property and personal liberty, and which thoughts and theories were calculated to cause any citizen then and there present and hearing the same to quarrel and fight and use force and violence.” And this although I told you at least a dozen times in your office that my only purpose was to stand on private property with the written permission of the owner, and there to read the Constitution of the United States; and you perfectly well know that I did this, and only this, and that three sentences from the Bill of Rights of the Constitution was every word that I was permitted to utter--the words being those which guarantee “freedom of speech and of the press, and the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for the redress of grievances.”

But you told me that “this Constitution stuff” does not go at the Harbor. You have established martial law, and you told me that if I tried to read the Constitution, even on private property, I would be thrown into jail, and there would be no bail for me--and this even though I read you the provision of the State constitution guaranteeing me the right to bail. When you arrested me and my friends, you spirited us away and held us “incommunicado,” denying us what is our clear legal right, to communicate with our lawyers. All night Tuesday, and all day Wednesday up to four o’clock, you and your agents at the various jails and station-houses repeated lies to my wife and my attorneys and kept me hidden from them. When the clamor of the newspaper men forced you to let them interview me, you forced them to pledge not to reveal where I was. You had Sergeant Currie drive us up to Los Angeles, with strict injunctions not to get there before four o’clock--he did not tell me, but I heard another man give the order to him, and I watched his maneuvers to carry it out. It was your scheme to rush us into court at the last moment before closing, have lawyers appointed for us, and have us committed without bail, and then spirit us away and hide us again. To that end you had me buried in a cell in the city jail, and to my demands for counsel the jailers made no reply. Only the fact that someone you trusted tipped my wife off prevented the carrying out of this criminal conspiracy. My lawyers rushed to the jail, and forced the granting of bail, just on the stroke of five o’clock, the last moment.

I charge, and I intend to prove in court, that you are carrying out the conspiracy of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association to smash the harbor strike by brutal defiance of law. I was in the office of I. H. Rice, president of this Association, and heard him getting his orders from Hammond of the Hammond Lumber Company, and heard his promise to Hammond that the job would be done without delay. It is you who are doing the job for Rice, and the cruelties you are perpetrating would shock this community if they were known, and they will be punished if there is a God in Heaven to protect the poor and friendless. You did all you could to keep me from contact with the strikers in jail; nevertheless I learned of one horror that was perpetrated only yesterday--fifty men crowded into one small space, and because they committed some slight breach of regulations, singing their songs, they were shut in this hole for two hours without a breath of air, and almost suffocated. Also I saw the food that these men are getting twice a day, and you would not feed it to your dog. And now the city council has voted for money to build a “bull-pen” for strikers, and day by day the public is told that the strike is broken, and the men, denied every civil right, have no place to meet to discuss their policies, and no one to protect them or to protest for them. That is what you want--those are the orders you have got from the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association; the men are to go back as slaves, and the Constitution of the United States is to cease to exist so far as concerns workingmen.

All I can say, sir, is that I intend to do what little one man can do to awaken the public conscience, and that meantime I am not frightened by your menaces. I am not a giant physically; I shrink from pain and filth and vermin and foul air, like any other man of refinement; also, I freely admit that when I see a line of a hundred policemen with drawn revolvers flung across a street to keep anyone from coming onto private property to hear my feeble voice, I am somewhat disturbed in my nerves. But I have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice. I intend to do my duty to my country. I have received a telegram from the American Civil Liberties Union in New York, asking me if I will speak at a mass meeting of protest in Los Angeles, and I have answered that I will do so. That meeting will be called at once, and you may come there and hear what the citizens of this community think of your efforts to introduce the legal proceedings of Czarist Russia into our free Republic.

UPTON SINCLAIR

The ending of this episode: We hired a good-sized hall in Los Angeles by the week and held crowded meetings every afternoon and evening. The Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union was formed, and a Congregational minister, Reverend Clinton J. Taft, resigned from his pulpit and served as director for the next twenty years or so. At the end of a couple of weeks the editor of the Los Angeles _Examiner_ called me on the telephone and said, “Sinclair, how long is this thing going on?” I answered, “Until we have civil liberties in Los Angeles.” “What, specifically, do you mean by that?” he asked, and I said, “For one thing, Chief Oaks must be kicked off the force; and we must have the assurance that there will never again be mass arrests of strikers.” The editor said, “You may count upon both these conditions being met.” I asked, “What guarantee have we?” He said, “I have talked it over with the half-dozen men who run this town, and I have their word. You may take mine.”

So we called off the meetings. A few days later we read in the newspapers that Chief Oaks had been expelled from the force, having been found parked in his car at night with a woman and a jug of whisky. So far as I can recall, there have been no mass arrests of strikers in the past twenty-nine years.

V

Moved by the cruelties I had seen, I indulged myself in the pleasure of writing two radical plays--“radical” was a terrible word in those days. _Singing Jailbirds_ portrayed the Industrial Workers of the World, of whom we had met many; they sang in jail and were put “in the hole” for it. They were called “wobblies” because in the early days they had done their first organizing in a restaurant kept by an old Chinaman who could not say IWW but made it “I-wobble-wobble.”

I started with that scene, and then had the wobblies in jail recalling the battles they had fought and the evils they had suffered. There was a lot of singing all through, and the play made a hit when it was produced in Greenwich Village by a group of four young playwrights--one of them was Eugene O’Neill and another was John Dos Passos, who now after forty years has evolved from a rampant radical into a rampant conservative. I was writing for Bernarr Macfadden’s _Physical Culture_ in those days (at $150 per article). I took my boss to the show, and he put up a thousand dollars to keep it going. I, of course, got nothing.

The other play was in blank verse and was called _Hell_. It portrayed the devils as being bored, and amusing themselves by sending a messenger up to earth to create a great deposit of gold and set all the nations to warring over it. (This was just after World War I, of course.) My fastidious friend, George Sterling, was outraged by my verse, but I had a lot of fun. I found myself a solitary spot on the edge of the Arroyo Seco, and there paced up and down composing it and laughing over it. Dear old Art Young made a delightful cover drawing, and I published the play in pamphlet form; I still have copies, and--who can tell?--somebody might produce it before World War III comes and ends all producing.

Joking aside, I hope to live to see it.

VI

The only house we went to in Pasadena was that of Mrs. Gartz. This was a couple of miles up the slope from our home, and occupied a whole block of beautiful grounds, like a park. The house was built around a central court containing palm trees, ornamental plants, and a swimming pool. On the front of the house was a wide veranda and a flight of stone steps. The veranda looked out over the whole of Pasadena, and it was a pleasant place to sit and listen to arguments over the future of mankind.

Every Sunday afternoon Mrs. Gartz would invite some lecturer, and after she met Craig, all these lectures dealt with the so-called radical movement. It appeared that when the very rich become radical they go the whole way. She became far more radical than we were, and it was Craig’s function to tone her down; but, alas, this service was not appreciated by Mrs. Gartz’s husband, who blamed us for all his troubles. I could tell many funny stories of those meetings in a millionaire’s palace with a raging millionaire husband roaming through the rooms, growling and grumbling to himself.

The whole of the class struggle was represented in that tormented home. Wobblies, when they got out of jail, would come and tell Mrs. Gartz their stories; the tears would come into her eyes, and she would write indignant letters to the newspapers--which the newspapers did not print. Also, there were the pacifists of all varieties, and later the communists, who finally “captured” the gullible great lady.

Mrs. Gartz took up the practice of writing to public officials about these outrages against civil liberty, and as her letters were not always coherent she would bring them to Craig to revise. Craig would take occasion to tone them down a bit; so presently she was in charge of all the great lady’s public relations. Craig hit upon the idea of publishing a little volume entitled _Letters of Protest_. This made a hit, and thereafter every year there would be a little volume that Mrs. Gartz distributed to everyone on her mailing list. In all there were seven pretty little books, and no doubt they helped somewhat to diminish the stodginess of our millionaire city.

VII

I have given a few glimpses of Mary Craig’s skill as a social practitioner. I must also tell a little about her as a homemaker.

To the north of the “brown house” we had bought, there extended seven lots rising slightly to a corner, from which the view over the Arroyo was still more attractive. Craig said nothing to me about her plans, but she bought those lots on installment payments. When I started the magazine it was on our dining-room table; so she went out traveling on foot about the town and found an old house that she bought for a hundred and fifty dollars and had moved onto the lot next to ours. She had a carpenter build a long table, and that was where the magazines were wrapped and prepared for the mail. One little cubbyhole in that house became my office, and several books were written there.

Of course, as the subscriptions came in we had to have still more help. We had no car in those days, but somehow Craig found another house and had it moved and connected up with the first one. Before she got through, she had bought four houses and fitted them in a row on two lots, and bought a fifth house to be wrecked for lumber to join the other houses together. I wrote an article about it in my magazine, _Upton Sinclair’s_, and printed a photograph of the houses.

It made a really funny story, because every house was a different color. I described the consternation of the neighbors; but they recovered when the job was finished, for Craig really made a beautiful home of it, with a long porch along the front and, of course, a uniform coat of paint. It was an especially good home for us because Craig could have her room at the south end and I could practice my violin at the north end.

There was an old carpenter named Judd Fuller who worked for Craig, making old houses into new. Many a time I sat on a roof with him, nailing down shingles; and all the time we talked politics, and the state of the world. I tried to make a socialist out of an old-style American individualist, and I learned how to deal with that kind of mind. Some years later I wrote a pamphlet called _Letters to Judd_, and of course made him very proud. I printed something over a hundred thousand of the pamphlet, and with the help of Haldeman-Julius distributed them over the country.

VIII

I decided to muckrake world literature. I had read a mass of it in the one language my mother had taught me, in the three that my professors had failed to teach me--Latin, Greek and German--and in the two I had taught myself--French and Italian. To me literature was a weapon in the class struggle--of the master class to hold its servants down, and of the working class to break its bonds. In other words, I studied world literature from the socialist point of view.

That had been done here and there in spots; but so far as I knew it had not been done systematically, and so far as I know it has not been done since. Of course, _Mammonart_ was ridiculed by the literary authorities; and of course I expected that. It was all a part of the class struggle, and I had set it forth in the book. Great literature is a product of the leisure classes and defends their position, whether consciously or by implication. Literature that opposes them is called propaganda. And so it is that you have probably never heard of my _Mammonart_.

I had now studied our culture in five muckraking books: _The Profits of Religion_, _The Brass Check_, _The Goose-Step_, _The Goslings_, _Mammonart_. After that, I took up American literature, mostly of my own time. I had known many of the writers, and some liked me and some didn’t, according to which side they were on. I had published the five earlier books myself--in both cloth and paper; but there were not so many libel suits in the field of literature, so now I found a publisher. From that time on for many years my arrangement was that the publisher had his edition and I had mine, always at the same price. I had a card file of some thirty thousand customers.

I called the new book _Money Writes!_ Its thesis was that authors have to eat; in order to get food they have to have money, and for that to happen the publisher has to get more money. So, in a commercial world it is money that decides what is to be written. My discussion of this somewhat obvious truth gave offense to many persons.

IX

When I was working on a book, my secretary had orders never to disturb me. But one day she did disturb me by bringing in a visiting card attached to a hundred-dollar bill. (She judged I would consider that a fair price for an interruption.) I looked at the card and saw the name, King C. Gillette, familiar to all men who use a safety razor. Some years earlier I had noted on the shelves of the Pasadena Public Library two large tomes entitled _World Corporation_ and _Social Redemption_. I had taken them down and examined them with curiosity; they were written by a man who apparently had never read a socialist book but had thought it all out for himself. (I could guess that I might be the only person who had ever taken those tomes from the library shelf.)

Gillette, of course, was pleased to hear that I knew his books. He was a large gentleman with white hair and mustache and rosy cheeks; extremely kind, and touchingly absorbed in the hobby of abolishing poverty and war. But I discovered that he had a horror of the very word _socialism_. To him that meant class struggle and hatred, whereas he insisted that his solution could all be brought about by gentle persuasion and calm economic reasoning. He would take the time to explain this to anyone on the slightest occasion. I discovered that the joy of his life was to get someone to listen while in his gentle pleading voice he told about his two-tome utopia.

He had come to me for a definite purpose. He knew that I had an audience, and he wanted me to convert that audience to his program. He had a manuscript, and he wanted me to take it and revise it--of course, not changing any of his ideas. For this service he was prepared to pay me five hundred dollars a month; and a little later when he met my wife he raised his offer. He said, “Mrs. Sinclair, if you will get him to do this for me you will never have to think about money again as long as you live.” That had a good sound to Craig, and she said I would do it.

She told me so, and of course I had to do what she said. Little by little I discovered what it meant: Mr. Gillette was coming for two mornings every week to tell me his ideas--the same ideas over and over again. He was a bit childish about it. He didn’t remember what he had said a week or two previously and said it again, most seriously, impressively, and kindly. It became an endurance test. How often could I listen to the same ideas and pretend that they were new and wonderful? The time came when I could stand no more, not if he had turned over to me all the royalties from Gillette razors and blades. I had to tell him that I had done everything I could do for him.

I had helped him to get his manuscript into shape, but, alas, he had scribbled all over it and interlined it. I had it recopied, and with his permission submitted it to Horace Liveright, my publisher at that time. Horace couldn’t very well refuse it because Gillette offered to put up twenty-five thousand dollars for advertising. The book was published, and in spite of all the effort it fell flat.

But the dear old gentleman never gave up. He would come to see us now and then and invite us to his home. He had one down at Balboa Beach, and another far up in the San Fernando Valley. When Sergei Eisenstein came, we took him and a party up to meet Gillette, but the family were away. We had a picnic under one of the shade trees on the estate and carefully gathered up all the debris.

X

Writing books involves hard labor of both brain and typewriter. I have mentioned more than once the subject of tennis--the device by which I was able to get the blood out of my brain and into my digestive apparatus. All through those years I used to say that I was never more than twenty-four hours ahead of a headache. I had read somewhere in history that it was the law in the armies of King Cyrus that every soldier had to sweat every day. I found that I could get along with sweating three times a week. (Out of curiosity I once weighed before and after a hard tennis match in Pasadena’s summer weather, and discovered that I had parted with four and a half pounds of water.)

Tennis is a leisure-class recreation, and on the courts I met some of the prominent young men of my City of Millionaires. I was amused to note that their attitude toward me on the court was cordial and sometimes even gay, but we did not meet elsewhere. Sometimes their wives would drive them to the court and call for them when the game was over; but never once was I invited to meet one of those wives. I quietly mounted my bicycle and pedaled a couple of miles, slightly uphill, to my home. On Sunday morning I had a regular date with three men: one of the town’s leading bankers, one of the town’s leading real-estate men, and another whose high occupation I have forgotten. We played at the ultrafashionable Valley Hunt Club, but never once was I invited to enter the doors of that club. When the game was over, I mounted my bicycle and pedaled away.

One of these cases is especially amusing, and I tell it even though it leads me ahead of my story. I had a weekly tennis date with a young man of a family that owned a great business in Los Angeles. The young man, who lived in Pasadena, called me “the human rabbit,” because I scurried across the court and got shots that he thought he had put away. Every time we played, his wife would be waiting in her car, and I dutifully kept my distance.

After several years I learned from the newspapers that he had divorced his wife. Then Craig read an advertisement that all the furniture of an elegant home was being offered for sale. She wanted a large rug for the living room, so I drove her to the place and waited outside while she went in. It proved to be a long wait, but I always carry something to read so I didn’t mind. Craig bought a rug, and told me that the lady who was doing the selling was the ex-wife of my tennis friend! She was a chatty lady and had told her varied social adventures, including this:

“I almost caught Neil Vanderbilt. He drove up to a boulevard stop right alongside me, and I caught his eye. If that red light had lasted fifteen seconds longer, I’d have nailed him!”

(I myself with Craig’s help had already “nailed” Neil, and I shall have a bit to tell about him later on. He is the possessor of an enchanted name, which has brought him much trouble. I know only one man equally unfortunate--Prince Hopkins. When he traveled in Europe, the bellboys hit their foreheads on the ground; he changed his name to Pryns to avoid the sight.)

XI

In some trading deal Craig had come into possession of two lots on Signal Hill, near Long Beach; and now in the papers she read the electrifying news that oil had been discovered under that wide hill. I drove her down there to find out about it, and she learned that lot owners in the different blocks were organizing, since obviously there could be no drilling on a tiny bit of land. I must have taken Craig a dozen times--a distance of twenty miles or so--and I sat for that many evenings listening to the arguments. I hadn’t a word to say of course; the lots belonged to Craig, and she was the business end of the family.

It was human nature in the raw, and this was the first time I had seen it completely naked. There were big lots, and there were little lots; there were corner lots--these had higher value for residences, but did they have more oil under them? Cliques were formed, and tempers blazed--they never quite came to blows, but almost. And there sat a novelist, watching, listening, and storing away material for what he knew was going to be a great long novel. He listened to the lawyers and to the oilmen who came to make offers; they told their troubles. They wanted the lease as cheaply as possible, and they had no idea they were going to be in a novel with the title _Oil!_--including the exclamation point. The book was going to be taken by a book club, translated into twenty-seven languages, and read all over the world--but all they wanted was to get that lease more cheaply.

One of them offered in exchange a goat ranch somewhere down to the south, and so we drove there; I looked at the hills, and the goats, and the people who raised them. A crude country fellow, he too was going to be translated into twenty-seven languages, of which he had never even heard the names.

I told Craig what I was doing, of course; and it pleased her because it would keep me out of mischief for a year. She got tired of the oil game herself and sold her lots for ten thousand dollars each.

Into the novel I put not merely the oil business but Hollywood, where the wealthy playboys go; also the labor struggle, which is all over America. It made a long novel, 527 closely printed pages; when it was published, a kind Providence inspired the chief of police of Boston to say that it was indecent, and to bar it from the city. After that, of course, the publishers couldn’t get the books printed fast enough; and they besieged me to go to Boston and make a fight. “Would you trade on the indecency of your book?” demanded Craig; and I answered that I wished to trade on its decency. So she let me go.

In Grand Central Station when I took the train for Boston, I learned that the bookstand there couldn’t keep a supply of the books; everyone bound for Boston took copies for his friends. When I reached the city, I interviewed the chief of police, an elderly Catholic gentleman who told me which passages he objected to. I had those passages blacked out in some copies and sold them on the street--the fig-leaf edition, a rare collector’s item now. What shocked the Catholic gentleman most was the passage in which an older sister mentions the subject of birth control to a younger brother. I recall the soft voice of the old chief, pleading: “Now surely, Mr. Sinclair, nobody should write a thing like that.” I told him I earnestly wished that someone had done me that favor when I was young. I believed in birth control, and practiced it, and I am sure that the salvation of the human race will depend on it--and soon.

XII

During my stay in Boston I paid a visit to Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who had been in prison at that time for about six years, and whom I had visited not long after his arrest. He was one of the wisest and kindest persons I ever knew, and I thought him as incapable of murder as I was. After he and Nicola Sacco had been executed, I returned to Boston and gathered material for a two-volume novel dealing with their case.

I had developed what the doctor called a plantar wart under one heel, so it was hard for me to walk; but I got myself into a Pullman car, and when I reached Boston I hobbled around the streets with a crutch, talking with everyone who had been close to the case.

I had a story half formed in my mind. Among Mrs. Gartz’s rich friends I had met an elderly lady, socially prominent in Boston; Mrs. Burton was her name, and she enjoyed telling me odd stories about the tight little group of self-determined aristocrats who ruled the social life of the proud old city. Judge Alvan T. Fuller and President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard belonged to that group--and Bartolomeo Vanzetti didn’t. Mrs. Burton had come to California, seeking a new life, and I delighted her by saying that she would be my heroine--“the runaway grandmother,” I would call her.

For my story I needed to know not merely the Italian laborers, who were easy to meet, but the aristocrats, who were difficult. Soon after my arrival, still on a crutch, I read that the proprietor of a great Boston industry had died and was to be buried from his home. It was a perfect setup: a great mill in a valley, the cottages of the workers all about it, and the mansion of the owner on the height above. I went to that mansion and followed the little river of guests into the double parlor for the funeral service. When one of the sons of the family came up to me, I told him I had great respect for his father, and he said I was welcome. So I watched the scene of what I knew would be my opening chapter.

On my way back on a streetcar I was recognized by a reporter from the _Evening Transcript_, the paper then read by everybody who was anybody in and about Boston. He had come to write up the funeral, and he included me. I shall never forget the horror on the face of a proper Boston couple when I told them of my attendance at that funeral. Maybe it will shock the readers of this book. I can only say that if you are a novelist you think about “copy” and not about anybody’s feelings, even your own. If I were talking to you about that scene, I wouldn’t say, “Was it a proper thing to do?” I would say, “Did I get that scene correct?” When I went back to the little beach cottage, I wrote a two-volume novel in which all the scenes were correct; and the novel will outlive me.

On the way home I stopped at Denver for a conference with Fred Moore, who had been the original attorney for Sacco and Vanzetti, and had been turned away when one of the Boston aristocracy, W. G. Thompson, consented to take over the appeals. Fred was bitter about it, of course, and it might be that this had influenced his opinion. He told me he thought there was a possibility that Sacco was involved in the payroll holdup. He thought there was less chance in the case of Vanzetti. There were anarchists who called themselves “direct actionists,” and Fred knew of things they had done. I pointed out to him that if Sacco had been guilty and Vanzetti innocent it meant that Vanzetti had given his life to save the life of some comrade.

Of course, I did not know and could only guess. I wrote the novel that way, portraying Vanzetti as I had known him and as his friends had known him. Some of the things I told displeased the fanatical believers; but having portrayed the aristocrats as they were, I had to do the same thing for the anarchists. The novel, _Boston_, ran serially in _The

## Bookman_ and was published in two handsome volumes that went all over

the world.

Just recently I had the honor of a visit from Michael Musmanno, who as a young lawyer came late into the Sacco-Vanzetti case and gave his heart as well as his time and labor to an effort to save the lives of those two men. Being Italian himself, he felt that he knew them, and he became firmly assured of their innocence. Now he has become a much-respected justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania; but he still feels as he did, and poured out his soul as if he were addressing the jury of a generation ago. The bitter old Boston judge and the grim governor and the cold-hearted president of Harvard all came to life, and I found myself sitting again in the warden’s reception room at Charlestown prison, in converse with the wise and gentle working-class philosopher named Bartolomeo Vanzetti. I had sent him several of my books, and he had been permitted to have them; I wish that I could have had a phonograph to take down his groping but sensitive words.

_12_

_More Causes--and Effects_

I

We had made too many friends and incurred too many obligations in Pasadena; so we found a cottage down on the ocean front at Alamitos Bay, Long Beach, and moved there. During both of my trips to Boston, Craig stayed alone in the little beach cottage and never minded it. Somehow she felt safe, and the waves on the other side of the boardwalk lulled her to sleep. She had become fascinated with the problem of her own mind, and studied it with the help of scores of books that I had got for her. I still have more than a hundred volumes on psychology and philosophy and psychic research that she read and marked--Bergson, William James, William McDougall, Charcot, Janet--a long list of the best. She had had psychic experiences herself in her girlhood and was tormented with the desire to understand these hidden forces of the mind. All the time that I was writing _Oil!_ and _Boston_, I was also helping her to find out what her gift actually was--and to guess what it meant. The result was the book called _Mental Radio_.

The procedure we adopted was the simplest possible: I would make half a dozen drawings on slips of paper and put each inside an envelope. Then I would bring them to Craig, who was lying on her couch. She would lay one of them over her solar plexus--having read somewhere that this might be the center of the unknown forces. We didn’t know whether that was so or not; but the solar plexus was as good as any other place. I would sit quietly and keep watch so as to be able to say that she did not cheat--although, of course, I knew that she had never cheated in her life. She had only one obsession--she wanted to know for certain if these forces were _real_.

She would decide that something that had come into her mind was _the_ reality, and she would take pencil and pad and make a drawing. Then we would open the envelope and compare the two. The results were amazing to us both.

I had been reading about telepathy and clairvoyance since my youth. At Columbia I had studied with James Hyslop, who had been a patient psychic researcher; then there was the Unitarian minister who had performed my first marriage--Minot J. Savage--who told me he had seen and talked with a ghost who said that he had just been drowned off the coast of Britain. The results in Craig’s case settled the matter for us, and settles it for anyone who is unwilling to believe that we are a pair of imbeciles as well as cheats. There is no other alternative, for we took every possible precaution against any blunder, and there is no way to account for what happened except to say that a drawing completely invisible to the eyes can make an impression on the mind by some other means.

It was not merely from my drawings that Craig got these impressions. She got them from the mind of a professional medium, whom she employed to experiment with her. I have given the details in _Mental Radio_. I printed several thousand copies of the book, and the experiments it describes have stayed unexplained now for thirty years. It is worth noting also that _Mental Radio_ has just been reissued--this time by a publisher of scientific books exclusively. This is significant.

Professor William McDougall, who had been head of the department of psychology first at Oxford and then at Harvard, wrote a preface to the book. When he came to see us at the little beach cottage, he told us that he had just accepted a position as head of the department of psychology at Duke University; he had a fund at his disposal and proposed to establish a department of parapsychology to investigate these problems. He said he had taken the liberty of bringing several cards in his pocket, and he would like to be able to say that Craig had demonstrated her power to him.

Craig, always a high-strung person, hated to be submitted to tests because they made her nervous; but her respect for McDougall was great, and she said she would do her best. She sat quietly and concentrated. Then she said that she had an impression of a building with stone walls and narrow windows, and the walls were covered with something that looked like green leaves. McDougall took from an inside pocket a postcard of a building at Oxford University covered with ivy. There were two or three other successes that I have forgotten. The outcome was that McDougall said he was satisfied, and would go to Duke and set up the new department. He did so, with results that all the world knows.

I was interested to observe the conventional thinker’s attitude toward a set of ideas that he does not wish to accept. _Mental Radio_ contained 210 examples of successes in telepathy--partial successes and complete successes. To the average orthodox scientist, the idea was inconceivable, and it just wasn’t possible to tell him anything that he knew in advance couldn’t have happened. On the other hand, the lovely personality of Mary Craig is shown all through the book, and I cannot recall that any scientist ever accused her of cheating. He would go out of his way to think of something that _might_ have happened, and then he would assume that it _had_ happened; it _must_ have happened, and that settled the matter. He would entirely overlook the fact that I had mentioned that same possibility and had stated explicitly that it _hadn’t_ happened; that we had made it absolutely impossible for it _to have_ happened.

I won’t be unkind enough to name any scientist. One suggested solemnly that it might have been possible for Mary Craig to have gotten an idea of the drawing by seeing the movements of my hand at a distance. But in the