oe

working-
| Me a orking-class

TENT wT ee Jl

Upton Sinclair died at the age
hiber on November 25. As a
ae to the memory of this
in American writer we re-
ee Re following article by
the Ph North which appeared in

Daily World.

pe last place in the world I
an ght I would encounter the
Bon-killer, Upton Sinclair,
sna most widely read
Or world-wide, was where I

| inally did catch up with him:

a Jersey hillside -among
oa and pine-trees not far
- Ound Brook. I long felt
eid meet him sometime in
5 eumneyings and I tried when

ved in Monrovia, California.

, an the neighbors said the man

ey knew—that socialist!
= moved East and nobody
actos where. Now here he was,
a the Hudson, this man
had © book, one of his ninety,
the Persuaded me to enlist in
movement.
tbe Nd countless others. That
iar “The Cry for Jus-
miss An Anthology of Social
Often Through the Ages.” I
other Teflected on how many
Who young men there are to
‘0m it gave the same counsel
ie Left, Young Man, Go
Yo We are armies.
thane know that he is probably
tifieg lerican writer most iden-
conte With the workingclass —
ang uPorary of Jack London
Wola eins Mike Gold. The
Sh reads more of his works
any other American writer.
autyooked at, him on this
eam day in Jersey. Time has
Walle, the spring out of his
mous Tobbed\ him of that enor-
ener bonuce, that prodigious
ally ¢ that was characteristic-
Year 's (90 books! One for each
his MA his life for he just had
th birthday). But time had
Corroded his mind, which
rns, clear as it was when he
Probe The Jungle’ which is
tenn the best known Amer-
Wi Novel in the world. It ranks
a Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the
S of the world’s readers.
eds €re were old people on
Othe, Others on wheelchairs,
Darl TS on crutches, in the sunny
a of the old folk’s home,
M4 1 doubt if many of them
ained that hunger for living
: 3 made Sinclair the man he
behi is eyes are clear and blue
Ind his spectacles, and
eet the range of his voice is
certain, his smile is brilliant,
r octane, “lighting up the
in ™m,” as one of his neighbor-
Ne contemporaries told the
bic York Times at this recent
hin hday party marking his
it wteth year. The Times gave
idetmost a page, for hate his
ca 4S or not, the Establishment
idenet ignore this man who long
Entified himself with the goals
a the socialist country that
ree first on the scene — the
SSR.
aa son, an atomic scientist,
Ww ived to take Sinclair for his
€ekly ride in the family car.
a Sage invited me to accom-
we, him on the ride and I went.
® talked as we rolled through
a fall countryside, past the
Bently changing hills, past the
Orthern Jersey meadows. He
ws his eyes fastened on the
han’ entranced by it as he had
en by life for nine-tenths of
century.

IR

SEIDEL SEE EE

I told him that he was, in a
major way, my spiritual god-
father. I was in my teens when
his anthology of social protest
came my way. When I finished
this work, which contains the
ethical considerations of the
world’s sages, prophets and
workingmen, I could never be
the same. I could never look at
a workingman without seeing
the scars of slavery on his face.

Sinclair took my hand in his.
“T hope I lived up to being your
godfather,” he replied, smiling.
“I shall try to keep living up to
it,’ he said poignantly, this
man who had ten years more
to go to round out a century.

A new generation has come to
know Upton Sinclair, for his
son told he Sinclair’s works
are required reading in many
public schools. Rarely does a
writer pass his three-score years
and ten and retain his public.

Our William Dean Howells,
the arbiter of his day and friend
of Tolstoy, was forgotten while
he still lived. New times, new
ways; a new generation chased
after different styles. But the
horrendous truths Upton Sin-
clair saw — wage-slavery aS it
was called in another day—re-
main alive and the facts are
fateful.

Oddly, his life did not start
on the other side of the tracks:
He came from a well-placed
southern family that numbered
daring ancestors who were naval
officers; a great grandfather
commanded America’s forces on
Lake Huron in the War of 1812,
a grandfather was a Confeder-
ate navy Officer. True, his own
family was always on the rag-
ged edge — his father had the

aristocratic Southerners’ weak- |

ness for the bottle — Sinclair
writes in his memoirs—and the

live was often

wherewithal to
100 proof

drowned in~ pure

Bourbon,
“when he was not under the

influence of the Demon Rum,”
Sinclair writes of his father, he
dearly loved his family; “‘so the
thirty years during which I
watched him were one long
mortal agony.” Upton’s own
childhood gravitated between
extreme poverty and the silken
covers of ‘affluence. When his
mother could find no money in
the drawers of his father’s desk,
she took young Upton to the
home of his grandfather, an
affluent railroad official.. The
boy’s life. “was a series of Cin-
derella transformations.” He re-
gards that as a basic- reason for
his “one favorite theme: the
contrast of the social classes;
there are characters from both
worlds, the rich and the poor,
and the plot is contrived to
carry
other.”
His. career as writer began
modestly enough as a drudging
author of pulp stories. He dis-
covered, by accident, that he
had the imagination and indus-
try to turn them out by the
ream and publishers Street and
Street bought them, mostly fan-
ciful tales of West Point and
Annapolis. They paid miserably,
but enough to help his mother
meet the expenses when the
father’s income Was washed
away in the alcoholic _ tides.
Early a compulsion to depict the
lot of the workingman, align
himself with the disinherited,
manifested itself. “The Jungle”
was published in 1906, making
an enormous. dent in the pub-
lishing world of the day. Sin-
clair sought to depict.the harsh
lot of the workingman, but the
critics put the emphasis on the

you from one to the.

insanitary conditions of the
stockyards. The revelations ob-
liged President Theodore Roose-
velt to invite the young socialist
writer to the White House.
Roosevelt was a man of strong
hates and he feuded with cer-
tain lords among the meat-
packing millionaires. The result
was the passage of the Pure
Food Law. Sinclair had aimed
at overthrowing the system, but
he had to be content with an
improvement in its culinary san-
itation. A beginning, he smiled.
Utopia will come later. “I aimed
for the public’s heart,” he said,
“and I hit.it in the, stomach.”

He was all of 28 when he up-
set the meat packing industry.
At 65 he won the Pulitzer Prize.
All his life, as the Times vouch-.
safes, he “campaigned for social-
ism.” He had become a member
of the Socialist Party in New
Jersey.

The Pulitzer he got was for
“Dragon Harvest” a novel about
the rise of Hitlerism, one of the
famous Lanny Budd series
wherein he proposed to cover all
the prime events of history from
1913 to 1949: George Bernard
Shaw wrote Sinclair to say his
novels depict what happened in
his (Shaw’s) lifetime.

There was much in his 90
books with which.a Marxist can
disagree. But no American
writer has yet equalled his re-
lentless exposure of capitalism.

Naturally the first socialist
country in the world — the
U.S.S.R. — commanded his keen
attention. And of it he wrote, on
its twentieth anniversary, in
1937:

“As a writer who has spent
his whole life in the effort to

produce enlightening books, yi

am not indifferent to the fact
that in the Soviet Union some
millions of my books have beer
placed in the hands of readers.
I cannot greet all these readers
individually, so I take this occa-
sion to send them a collective
greeting and to tell them that,
for twenty years, I have watch-
ed the development of their
country and whenever I read
about’ a new subway being
opened, or a new dam starting
to make electricity, or a new
giant> combinat turning out
some useful and necessary pro-
duct; I fee] as proud as if I had
done it myself.”

Sinclair concluded with words
then ..that bear close scrutiny
today: “I know that you would
have. had much more personal
freedom and much more pros-
perity, both personal and nation-

al, if it had not been for the

imminent threat of war through-
out these twenty years.” (Rem-
ember, this was written in 1937.
J.N.) “But the threat,” Sinclair
continued; “is there and we, all
of us, have to do all we can
individually and collectively to
bring the democratic peoples of
the world to a realization of
their danger and to collective
action to make the world safe
against gangsters, now and for
all future’ time.”>

However, history hag recorded
that Sinclair developed certain
deep differences with the course
of Soviet policy in the inter-
vening years. Yet his wagon was
ever hitched to the star of soc-
ialism. And in the latter years,
sage that he is, he transcended
his differences as is evidenced
by his replies to my question
asking him what he had to say
to the Soviet people today.

“Keep doing what you are do-
ing,” he said to the Soviet peo-
ple, his voice overcoming’ the
quaver of age, “keep doing what
you Have been doing, and man-
kind- ‘will be grateful to you.
Your works are sublime.”
-'T°embraced him on departing
and then I returned to ask a
question I had wanted to ask:
“Comrade Sinclair, you are the

father of many children,” I said.
| “Ninety. books. Would you tell
«me which, if any, is your fav-
-orite child?”

He reflected -briefly, “I would
say it is ‘The Cry for Justice,’

my anthology.”

' I- was oddly moved, for this
was the book that had directed
mé to the laboring classes of
the world, me and numberless
more. In the preface to that
book he adjures the reader to
read all the pleas, the cries, the
thunderings of the sages and
prophets, hoping that his reader,
“will be led to dedicate your-
self to the greatest hope, the
most wondrous vision which has
ever thrilled the souls of human-
ity.”

He consecrates his book, with
a verse from John Masefield,
dedicates it to
“the men of the tattered

battalion -
which fights ’til it dies
Dazed with the dust of battle,
the din and the cries

The men with the broken heads.

», and the blood running into
BONDI EVRA Se ae

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—DECEMBER 6, 1968—Page 9