Upton Sinclair: California Socialist, Celebrity Intellectual

2. Making Real Men of Our Boys, 1893–1904

19 chapter two Making Real Men of Our Boys [1893–1904] When he uttered disrespectful opinions concerning Vanderbilts and respectability in general, he passed out of the range of parental comprehension. floyd dell, 1930 By the 1890s the Sinclairs had managed to rent a tiny apartment on West Sixty-Fifth Street where they could cook their own meals. On a typical day Upton might stop at the neighborhood market on the way home. He would hand a grocery boy a pencil-written order, along with a nickel tip.The meat was wrapped,laid on top of a box of ice, and delivered to his family by sled the next day. Now that they were out of the boardinghouse, he hoped to recover from the stomach ailments that had bothered him since childhood.Although they were still poor, his family’s temporary stability in their own apartment must have been a great comfort. Demonstrating his happiness when the family seemed to be thriving, he wrote that “Mother did the cooking and Father would put an apron over his little paunch and wash the dishes; there was much family laughter and father kissed the cook.”¹ Making Real Men of Our Boys 20 Learning Manhood Although he was technically too young at fourteen,Upton Sinclair had managed to gain entrance to the College of the City of New York (ccny) in 1892. In those years when private colleges were restricted by race and religion, thousands of brilliant individuals attended City College because they had no other option, although until 1929 City College was an all-male institution. Its academic excellence and its reputation as a school for the working class earned it the reputation of the poor man’s Harvard.² Students attended classes in the old brick building at Twenty-Third Street and Lexington Avenue. Later Sinclair described the college as “not very good, but convenient for the son of a straw-hat salesman addicted to‘sprees’...we trooped from one classroom to another and learned by rote what our bored instructors laid out for us.”³ College curriculum in 1900 was not designed to be relevant to young people’s lives.4 Certainly for Upton Sinclair, his college classes did nothing to explain his father’s alcoholism or what he called the“Cinderellalike ” quality of his upbringing. The teachers at ccny were all appointed by the Tammany political machine that controlled city government,and thus were all Catholic. In the late nineteenth century, Tammany became a central locus of Irish politics in New York City. In a time before the existence of social welfare programs, Tammany politicians provided aid to the indigent. Irish Catholic immigrants in particular were intensely loyal to Tammany. Sinclair recalled:“It was the first time I had ever met Catholics, and I found them kindly but set in dogma, and as much given to propaganda as I myself was destined to become.”5 When Sinclair found that a course didn’t interest him, he dropped it. About his history class, he writes ironically that he could not understand why he had to memorize“the names of so many kings and dukes and generals, and the dates when they had slaughtered so many human beings.”6 In his own novels, the question of why such slaughters occurred,rather than their dates,would be explored. 1893–1904 21 Upton Sinclair found most of his inspiration on his own, outside of the classroom. When he picked up a volume of Emerson’s Essays, he found “in this shrewd and practical nobility” what he was looking for.7 During this period,he also sought guidance from the Reverend William Wilmerding Moir from the Church of Holy Communion. Moir mentored a group of young men, who met at Reverend Moir’s home once or twice a month, with a particular attention to the importance of chastity. If they were poor, Moir helped them find a job; if they were tempted sexually, they would go to see him. Sinclair wrote later that he regretted not getting from someone else “advice and aid in the task of finding a girl with whom I might have lived wisely and joyfully.”8 The minister’s abstinence education had eliminated any discussion of intimacy. Historian Anthony Rotundo has noted that “like any human creation, manhood can be shaped and reshaped by the human imagination; that is, manhood has a history. ”9 Upton Sinclair came of age in...