Upton Sinclair: California Socialist, Celebrity Intellectual

5. How I Ran for Governor, 1928–1939

101 chapter five How I Ran for Governor [1928–1939] Who scrapes from grimy pots and pans a certain kind of truth? Who tells the world to “Open Wide” and spots a hollow tooth? Who disavows the Here and Now and swears by what’s ahead? Who thinks the word “undignified” is better left unsaid? Sinclair is that most valiant man— If anyone’s to vouch for it, then I’m the one who can. albert einstein, translated by John Ahouse, 1933 In August 1927 Upton Sinclair wrote to Kate Crane Gartz that he was no longer interested in fighting over the publication and distribution of Oil! in Boston: “The situation there is too tense and serious for that kind of joking. What I want to do is to go very quietly and gather the material for a big novel, and take a couple of years to write it.”¹ Seven years earlier, Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti had been arrested in Brockton, Massachusetts, charged with the robbery and murder of a shoefactory paymaster and his guard. Their supporters insisted that the two men were targeted only because of their political identity as anarchists and that the attack on these immigrants was part of the nationwide backlash against radicals following World War I. After a trial that attracted little publicity, the men were sentenced to death.Sinclair had visited Vanzetti in Charlestown Prison immediately after the trial. Vanzetti, like Sinclair, was a vegetarian and a Prohibitionist. He wrote in his limited English to Sinclair: How I Ran for Governor 102 “I will never forget your visit nor what your golden pen—that so many good battles valiantly fought in behalf of the truth and of the freedom—had wrote in my defense.”² The case began to draw national—indeed, international—attention, but the campaign to overturn the death sentences failed to sway Massachusetts authorities , and the two were executed on August 23, 1927. Howard Zinn explains that Sinclair wrote Boston in nine months,“in what seems like a barely controlled anger, right after the execution.”³ Sinclair chose to tell the story through the voice of a sixty-year-old woman. His protagonist, Cornelia, deserts her aristocratic family to live with poor Italians, work in a factory, and walk a picket line. German critic Ingrid Kerkhoff suggests that “Sinclair might have been inspired by the women who worked in the Sacco and Vanzetti defense committees.”4 Cornelia is the quintessential Sinclair hero: a wealthy and cultured American who identifies with the struggles of the oppressed. Like Kate Crane Gartz, Cornelia resists the life of privilege she has inherited in favor of social action. British scholar Dennis Welland points out that through knowing Cornelia,“Vanzetti came to understand that goodness is not a matter of class.”5 Historians Lewis Joughin and Edmund Morgan wrote that the book’s “combination of completeness, accuracy, and penetration places Boston in the front rank of historical novels.”6 But Thornton Wilder, not Upton Sinclair, won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The chairman of the Pulitzer Selection Committee wrote to Sinclair that Boston “only missed winning because of its socialist tone.”7 That year Sinclair turned fifty. Two years later, when Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he scolded the judges for not having honored his mentor Upton Sinclair,“of whom you must say, whether you admire or detest his aggressive socialism, that he is internationally better known than any other American artist whosoever, be he novelist, poet, painter, sculptor, musician, architect.”8 Lewis’s Elmer Gantry was inspired by The Profits of Religion. Later, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and George Bernard Shaw would also 1928–1939 103 sign unsuccessful petitions advancing the candidacy of Upton Sinclair to the Nobel committees. The Wet Parade and Women’s Culture While the male companions of his youth—George Sterling, Jack London, and Eugene O’Neill—had perished, many from alcoholism ,Sinclair was full of vigor and imagination.His friendships with women, already flourishing, deepened during the thirties, offering badly needed camaraderie and validation for these activists and writers.Such friendships were possible because they neither threatened his marriage nor impinged on the women’s independence. An impressive record of Sinclair’s rapport with women writers can be found in his unpublished correspondence, which offers evidence that Upton Sinclair read books with his wife...