The other guest at the dinner was likewise a person worth hearing about. Gaylord Wilshire had made a fortune in billboard advertising in Los Angeles (Wilshire Boulevard is named after him). Then out of a clear sky he announced his conversion to socialism, made a speech in one of the city parks, and was sent to jail for it. He started a weekly; he then brought it to New York and turned it into a monthly. He was spending his money fast, offering prizes such as grand pianos and trips around the world for the greatest number of new subscribers. He had a standing offer of ten thousand dollars to William Jennings Bryan to debate socialism with him, but the canny “boy orator” never took that easy money; he knew nothing about socialism, and the quick-witted editor would have made a monkey of him.
Wilshire always insisted that his conversion was purely a matter of intellect; he had become convinced that capitalism was self-eliminating, and that its breakdown was near. But as a matter of fact, a sense of justice and a kind heart had much to do with his crusade. To hear him talk, you would think him a cynical man of the world, a veritable Mephisto; but his greatest faults were generosity, which made it impossible for him to keep money, and a sort of “Colonel Sellers” optimism, which made him sure he was going to get a lot more at once. The advertising men in New York had assured him that the problem of a monthly magazine was solved when it got four hundred thousand subscribers, because at that mark the advertising made any magazine self-sustaining. Hence the prizes; but alas, when the fourhundred thousand mark was reached, it was discovered that the big national advertisers would not patronize a magazine that in its reading columns threatened their privileges. So Wilshire was “stuck,” and went into the business of mining gold in order to keep his magazine going in spite of the advertisers. That is a tale I shall tell later.
The editor took me uptown and introduced me to two sisters, of whom the older soon became his wife. The couple came to Princeton on their honeymoon and became our intimate friends. Mary Wilshire was a sort of older sister to me—though as a matter of fact I believe she was younger. “Gay” printed my picture in his magazine, and introduced me to the socialist movement as a coming novelist. I wrote for his columns—I remember “The Toy and the Man,” wherein I poked fun at the desire of grown-up Americans to accumulate quantities of unnecessary material things. If you look about you at the America of sixty years later, you will see that my sermon failed entirely of its effect.
It was either that summer or the next that the Wilshires took us with them for a two-week trip to Halifax, the editor having got transportation in exchange for advertising. We drove about and saw the Nova Scotia country, at its loveliest in early summer, and went swimming by moonlight in an inland lake. Incidentally, I discovered some cousins—it seems that a branch of the Sinclairs had left Virginia after the Civil War; so here was a surgeon at this British Army station. Somehow I got the impression that he was not entirely proud of his young genius relative, with an unmodish wife who took care of her own baby. He did not invite us to meet the wealth and fashion of the British Army, and we had time to ramble alone on the beach, where the baby filled his chubby fists with masses of squashy starfish.
Manassaswas completed in the spring of 1904 and published in August. Meanwhile I was reading the socialist weekly,Appeal to Reason, which was published in Girard, Kansas; it then had a circulation of half a million, and doubled it in the next few years. At that time two Western Miners’ officials, Moyer and Haywood, were being tried for a murder that they probably did not commit. TheAppealwas sure of their innocence. I was too, and in general I was becoming a red-hot “radical.” When the twenty thousand workers in the Chicago stockyards had their strike smashed in a most shocking way, I wrote a manifesto addressed to them: “You have lost the strike, and now what are you going to do about it?” This was just the sort of thing theAppealwanted, and they made it into a shouting first-page broadside and distributed hundreds of thousands of copies. I wrote a second broadside, “Farmers of America, Unite!” TheAppealpaid me for this by sending me twenty or thirty thousand copies, which was like a present of a herd of white elephants! I had to hire a boy and a horse and buggy for a couple of weeks to distribute them over the countryside around Princeton. Two years later I ran for Congress on the socialist ticket in that district, and maybe my propaganda got me half a dozen extra votes.
I learned something about the American small farming community during my three and a half years near Princeton. What their fathers had done, they did; as their fathers had voted, so voted they, and thought it was for Lincoln, or perhaps Tilden. They lived in pitiful ignorance and under the shadow of degeneracy. I often thought of writing a book about them—but you would not have believed me, because the facts fitted so perfectly into my socialist thesis that you would have been sure I was making them to order.
In a neighborhood two miles square, which I knew by personal contact and the gossip of neighbors, the only decent families were half a dozen that lived on farms of a hundred acres or more. The families that lived on ten or twenty-acre farms contained drunkards, degenerates, mental or physical defectives, semi-idiots, victims of tuberculosis or of venereal disease, and now and then a petty criminal. You could descend in the scale, according to the size of the farm, until you came to the Jukes—I don’t recall their real name, but students of eugenics will accept that substitute. The Jukes had no farm at all, but squatted in an old barn, and had six half-naked brats, and got drunk on vinegar, and beat each other, and howled and screamed and rioted, and stole poultry and apples from the neighbors.
These small farmers of New Jersey and other eastern states represented what had been left behind from wave after wave of migration—either to the West or to the cities. The capable and active ones escaped, while the weak ones stayed behind and constituted our “farm problem.” Prohibition did not touch them because they made their own “applejack,” with sixty per cent alcohol. Politics touched them only once a year, when they were paid from two to five dollars for each vote the family could produce. They worked their children sixteen hours a day and sent them to school three or four months in winter, where they learned enough to figure a list of groceries, and to read a local weekly containing reports of church “sociables” and a few canned items supplied by the power trust; also a Methodist or Baptist paper, with praises of the “blood of the Lamb” and of patent medicines containing opium and coal-tar poisons. Such was agricultural New Jersey almost sixty years ago. The farms still go on voting for Lincoln and McKinley, and hating the labor unions that force up the prices of the things farmers have to buy.
A play calledCandidaby a new British dramatist had been produced in New York. I had no money to see plays, but I borrowed the book, and it was like meeting Shelley face to face, a rapturous experience. Then cameMan and Superman—I remember reading it in the summertime, lying in a hammock by my woodland cabin and kicking my heels in the air with delight over the picture of the British aristocracy in heaven—not understanding the music, and being bored to death, but staying because they considered that their social position required it.
I was supporting my wife now, after a fashion, and so was in better standing with my father-in-law. He had a six-week vacation in the latter half of the summer, and invited me to accompany him on a canoe trip in northern Ontario. My father-in-law was a city-bred man with a passion for the primitive; he wanted to get to some place where no man had ever been before, and then he would explode with delight and exclaim, “Wild as hell!” We went up to the head of Lake Temeskaming, made a long portage, and paddled over a chain of lakes some two or three hundred miles, coming out by the Sturgeon River to Lake Winnipeg. We took two canoes, and lugged them heroically on ourshoulders, and learned to use a “tumpline,” and ran dangerous rapids with many thrills, and killed a dozen great pike in a day, and paddled up to a dozen moose so close that we could have touched them with our paddles. This country, which is full of cobalt and copper, is now a great mining region, but at that time there were not even trails, and the only white man we saw in several weeks was the keeper of a Hudson’s Bay Company post.
Here were Indians living in their primitive condition, and this interested me greatly. I asked many questions, and the trader at the post told me how in wintertime these Indians would kill a moose, and then move to the moose, and camp there until they had picked the bones. When I was writingOil!I remembered this; I told about “Dad,” my oilman, who would drill a well, and move his family to the well; I compared him to the Indians who moved their families to a moose. Later in the 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 amoose!
Going back home, I foundManassasabout to appear, and this was the psychological moment to make a killing with the magazines. Gertrude Atherton had published in theNorth American Reviewan 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 theReviewturned me down. I took the article toColliers, 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’spublished 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 inMcClure’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 wantedMcClure’sto publish it, but they didn’t dare to. So I turned it into an open letter and sent it toCollier’s. I have told inThe Brass Checkhow 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.
Manassasappeared, 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,Manassaswas the means of leading me out of the woods. The editor of theAppeal to Reasonread 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 writtenThe 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 thatI 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 theLancet, 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 theLancet. 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 ofThe Junglebegan 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.
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, imaginingourselves 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 onThe 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 ofThe 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.
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 theAppeal 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. “IntercollegiateSocialistSociety, 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. Atthis time he had had his great success withThe 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!
The first chapters ofThe Junglehad 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 theAppealcame to visit me, and sat in my little living room one evening to hear the story—and fell sound asleep! The politeauthor 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 downThe Jungle. There were five in all; and by that time I was raging and determined to publish it myself. The editor of theAppealgenerously 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 “theUncle Tom’s Cabinof 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 nowhad a business on my hands and had to be sending telegrams and mailing proofs. I had a printing firm in New York at work puttingThe Jungleinto 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 ofThe Jungleto James Keeley, managing editor of the ChicagoTribuneand 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 mentionedThe 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 theTribune.”
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 theSaturday 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 outproducts 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 toEverybody’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, ofMunsey’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 theSaturday Evening Post.
The article inEverybody’swas 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.
However,The Junglemade 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 aboutThe 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 timeCosmopolitanwas 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-lentscoun-drel thatGodAlmight-yev-erputonearth!” 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 thingsup. 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.
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 inThe 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 ofthe commission, I put the New YorkTimesonto 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 YorkHerald. 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 inThe 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 onThe Junglein 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 considereda 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.”
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 considereda 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 YorkEvening Worldsaid, “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 Junglewas 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 YorkEvening Worldto 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 firsttrain 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.
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 Iknew—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.
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 toEverybody’s Magazinethe 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 horrifiedEverybody’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 ahapax legomenonis, and apons asinorum, and aglyptocrinus decadactylus—and was proud of possessing such wisdom.
Another activity during that summer and autumn of 1906 was an effort to turnThe Jungleinto 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, butThe Junglewas 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 toldby the managers, with whom I had invested three thousand dollars.
ConcerningThe JungleI 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.
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 beas 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 theIndependent(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.
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?
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 ofothers, 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.
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 theCommonweal, 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 novelWeeds; 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 readEvangelineandHermonn 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 wasperhaps 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 sixP.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 wroteThe 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 atruly 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.
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 civilizationand 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.