Upton Sinclair: California Socialist, Celebrity Intellectual

3. Good Health and How We Won It, 1905–1915

39 chapter three Good Health and How We Won It [1905–1915] Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquished number! Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you— Ye are many—they are few. percy bysshe shelley, 1832 The years between 1905 and 1916 were rich with possibility for socialists, feminists, and radicals of all kinds in America. Socialism was never again as exciting and persuasive as during these years, before the purges of antiwar activists and immigrant organizers that occurred during World War I. The Republican Progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt opened a space for organizing that flocks of activists surged into, championing causes ranging from passing Prohibition to ending child labor, with food safety and votes for women among the panoply of issues to which women and men dedicated their lives.People still traveled by horse-drawn cart when The Jungle was published. Hundreds of magazines and newspapers flourished in every big city, and everyone who could, read them. In this period, Sinclair became both famous and infamous for The Jungle, founded a utopian colony, fell in love, divorced and remarried ,provided critical assistance to striking coal miners,and starred in a film version of his famous novel. Good Health and How We Won It 40 The Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Labor Movement When the twenty-six-year-old Upton Sinclair stepped off the train at the noisy Chicago Union Station, he spotted the Transit House Hotel, surrounded by horses and hitching posts. The porch was teeming with cowboys,ranchers,and cattle dealers.Carrying a single battered canvas suitcase, he trudged up the steps past the cowboys and cattlemen, who were passing whiskey bottles and clouding the air with the smoke from their cigars. The Union Stockyards sprawled next door, and the odor of cattle and manure mingled with the smell of beef and potatoes from the hotel kitchen. Sinclair had come from the New Jersey farmland with its maple and dogwood trees, its grassy fields full of milk cows. Nothing about this stockyard crammed with bawling cattle, nor this hotel populated exclusively by men,would have seemed familiar to him. However, to his great relief, he was met and embraced by Ernest Poole, with whom he had been corresponding for the past year. When they met in the lobby of the Transit House,Poole was a publicity agent for the meatpackers union.¹ He later wrote,“In breezed a lad in wide-brimmed hat,with loose-flowing tie and a wonderful warm expansive smile.‘Hello! I’m Upton Sinclair!’he said.‘And I’ve come here to write the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Labor Movement!’”² In Manassas Sinclair had written that critics often derided Stowe’s book as being of historical more than literary interest, “but he who can read a hundred pages of it, for the first or the twentieth time, with dry eyes, is not an enviable person.”³ In 1903 Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was the best-selling novel in America.4 Inspired by the realistic fiction of Harriet Stowe, Frank Norris, and Jack London,Sinclair wanted to write a novel that would break his readers ’hearts and move them to action. He set his novel in Chicago’s slaughterhouses because he hoped the focus on food production would appeal to readers’ self-interest. Meanwhile, his real subject would be the lives of the workers.5 The meatpacking industry was widely regarded as an unqualified 1905–1915 41 success, and it was one of the most financially stable American industries. Behind that force was meat baron Philip Armour, later described as“a sandy-haired,red-whiskered demigod of stock-yards mythology.”6 J. Ogden Armour took over as company president from his father in 1901.7 Soon afterward sales skyrocketed from $200 million to $1 billion.8 Sinclair wrote,“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.”9 But Chicago was not only the meatpacking center of the United States, it was also the location of Hull House, the settlement project to help immigrant workers that had been founded on the Near West Side by Jane Addams in 1889. In her own words, Jane Addams wanted to assist “in the solutions of life in a great city, to help our neighbors build responsible, self-sufficient lives for...