The latest of my plays,Cicero: A Tragic Drama in Three Acts, was written in the winter of 1959-60. I had been reading a history of ancient Rome and was impressed by the resemblances between the time of Cicero and the time of Eisenhower: the extremes of contrast between the rich and the poor; the rich exhibiting their glory by fantastic extravagances; the unemployed poor crowding into the cities, existing in slums on doles; the farmers deserting their land and rioting—they were doing it in Oklahoma; the domination of public affairs by big money; and the total blindness of the public to all these manifest evils.
I did not intend to preach a sermon; on the contrary, I determined to leave the resemblances to the discernment of the audience. I was going to show what Cicero faced and what happened to him. He was a rich man himself, a consul, a senator; he had all the honors. A lawyer, he tried criminal cases and made fortunes; a statesman, he was driven into exile, and when his party came into power he came back. In the end his enemies triumphed, and he fled and was captured; his head and hands were cut off and exhibited in the forum. That hasn’t happened as yet to anybody in America—but who knows?
Most terrifying in ancient Rome was—and in our own land is—the sexual corruption. When I was young I wrote a book about love and marriage,Love’s Pilgrimage. It contained a bridal scene and a birth scene that were detailed and without precedent; but every line was clean and true, and every doctor and every married person knew it. I was told there would be trouble, but there wasn’t. I was told there would be trouble in England, and I asked the English publisher to send a copy of the book to every bishop of the Church of England. He did so, and I got some kind letters from these gentlemen; you will find examples in the volume,My Lifetime in Letters. There was no trouble.
But the vileness that is being published today is revolting to every decent-thinking person. It is deliberately advertised and sold as vileness, and one after another the books enter the bestseller list. I have chosen to stay out of that competition; all Isay here is that it is exactly what Cicero saw in ancient Rome. He blistered it in his courtroom speeches; he named names—and that was a contributing cause to his murder.
I had the three-actCiceromimeographed, and one of the persons who I hoped would honor it was Albert Camus. He wrote me cordially, and I quote the first three sentences of his opinion—first in French and then in translation:
J’ai été bien touché par la confiance que vous m’avez faite en m’envoyant votreCiceron. C’est une tragédie pleine de sens et plus actuelle qu’il n’y paraît. On y comprend mieux un certain classicisme qui finissait dans les rains coupées et l’horreur.I have been indeed touched by the confidence you have shown me in sending me yourCicero. It is a tragedy full of sense and more real than it would seem. One there understands better a certain classicism which would finish with the kidneys cut and the horror.
J’ai été bien touché par la confiance que vous m’avez faite en m’envoyant votreCiceron. C’est une tragédie pleine de sens et plus actuelle qu’il n’y paraît. On y comprend mieux un certain classicisme qui finissait dans les rains coupées et l’horreur.
I have been indeed touched by the confidence you have shown me in sending me yourCicero. It is a tragedy full of sense and more real than it would seem. One there understands better a certain classicism which would finish with the kidneys cut and the horror.
I, and others, were puzzled by therains coupées—“the kidneys cut.” It was explained to me that the phrase approximates “a rabbit punch” in American parlance.
Camus went on to say that he had been “promised a theater” and would be able to deal with the play “with more precision.” Soon thereafter I read in the news that he had been assigned the directorship of the Théâtre Française, perhaps the most famous in the world. My hopes rose high. Then, alas, I read that he had been killed in a motorcar accident.
Taking my cue from Camus, I decided that the play might be “classical” in more than one sense, and might appeal to university audiences. I submitted the script to John Ben Tarver, then in the department of dramatic arts at New York University. With his permission I quote from his reply, dated April 3, 1960:
I have gone throughCiceroseveral times. It is a splendid play, and I want to thank you again for sending it to us. Here are some of my reactions:1. It has color, contrast, variety. Too many modern dramas labor one theme to death and never try to vary the thread of the story.2. It is told in dramatic terms. The finest writing in the world will not play in the theatre unless it is suited to a stage.3. It makes a statement which has general meaning, a statement which has meaning for today’s audience.4. The characters are sharp. All parts are good for actors. Every role is clearly defined. Cicero, in particular is superbly written.5. It calls for all the elements of the theatre to be brought into play.
I have gone throughCiceroseveral times. It is a splendid play, and I want to thank you again for sending it to us. Here are some of my reactions:
1. It has color, contrast, variety. Too many modern dramas labor one theme to death and never try to vary the thread of the story.
2. It is told in dramatic terms. The finest writing in the world will not play in the theatre unless it is suited to a stage.
3. It makes a statement which has general meaning, a statement which has meaning for today’s audience.
4. The characters are sharp. All parts are good for actors. Every role is clearly defined. Cicero, in particular is superbly written.
5. It calls for all the elements of the theatre to be brought into play.
Tarver undertook to give the play a commercial production Off Broadway in New York. He set out to raise the money, and I gave him the names of friends who might be interested. That, alas, made my dear Craig unhappy, because I had caused friends to lose money in the past, and I had been forbidden ever to do it again.
One of the names was that of Dick Otto, campaign manager of EPIC a quarter of a century back. Craig considered him one of the finest men she had ever known; she had stood by him all through those horrible two or three years (for EPIC had gone on after my defeat in the election). Then Dick had gone off on a small yacht to recuperate, and had come back to his business and had extraordinary success. Craig forbade him to put any money into the play, but he disobeyed her to the extent of ten thousand dollars, and that was sad and mad and bad indeed.
After elaborate preparation and numerous rehearsals, the play went on in a small theater on Second Avenue. Whatever power controls the weather in New York must have disapproved of my political and social opinions, for there fell such masses of snow that it was impossible for most people to get about. A few did get to the theater, and sent me enthusiastic telegrams, which gave me hope for a day or two. But, alas, the critics were lukewarm—most of them didn’t like the subject of the play. When I read accounts of the stuff they have to witness and praise, I am not surprised.
Ciceroran for about six weeks, and Dick Otto lost his ten thousand dollars. I lost the advance paid to me, which I had put back as an investment. Dick was sorry about the play but untroubled about the money—in the meantime he had developed a deposit of quicksilver on his property, and will now be richer than ever. The trouble is, it takes more of his time, and he delays writing the autobiography that he has been promising me—including, of course, the story of our EPIC campaign as he saw it.
I come now to the tragic, the almost unbearable part of my story. Craig had been overworking and overworrying, for many years. Nobody could stop her; when there was something to be done she did it, because she was the one who knewhowto do it. She had got so that she no longer wanted a servant. We had moved about so much.
Also, there was the smog. The growth of industry in Los Angeles, especially of the oil industry, had become tremendous; the fumes were brought our way by the sea breeze, and they settled around the mountain that went up directly back of our home. Everybody talked about smog, and even the newspapers had to discuss it, bad as it was for business.
So, in the spring of 1954, we moved again; this time to the Arizona desert, as far away from industry as possible. Phoenix was where Hunter lived, and he could come to help us. We found a cottage, and Hunter had a seven-foot concrete wall put around the lot. Those four boxes that had been built for storerooms, and which had been transported from Pasadena to Monrovia, were now transported from Monrovia to Buckeye, and set down in a row with an extra roof over them for coolness. One was to be my workroom, and the others were to hold my stock of books. I still could not get away from book orders.
Craig worked as she had always done, unsparing of her strength. In the middle of the night she called to me,terrified—she could not breathe. Lying down asleep, she had almost choked, and to get her breath she had to sit up. There were two doctors in the town, and I called one. He told us she had an enlarged heart, and it was due to overexertion: what she had now was a “congestive” heart attack. The heart was no longer equal to pumping the blood out of the lungs, and she had to sit up in order that part of her lungs could be clear.
So there we were, in a strange place, both of us possessed by dread. A specialist was brought from Phoenix, and he confirmed the diagnosis. “The patient should be taken to a hospital.” She was taken to Phoenix and treated for a couple of weeks, and she got a little better; but the specialist gave us no hope.
She was brought back to our Buckeye home, and I had her sole care. I had her care for the next seven years, and there were few days when we did not confront the thought of her doom.
I came upon an article about a treatment for such heart conditions advocated by Dr. Walter Kempner of Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina. I wired asking for literature, and there came a copy of a magazine published in Los Angeles calledG.P., meaning “General Practice.” It gave an account of Kempner’s treatment, and included x-ray photographs of hearts before and after treatment. The difference was striking, and I made up my mind that Craig was going to have Dr. Kempner’s rice-and-fruit diet. (His belief is that the cause of the heart enlargement is excess of salt in the blood, and rice is the all-nourishing food that has the lowest quantity of salt).
It was out of the question to move Craig to North Carolina. I phoned to a physician we knew in Riverside and asked if he would give the rice diet according to Kempner’s specifications. He said, “I will do it if you will take the responsibility.” Then he gave a little laugh and added, “If you will take half.” I said, “I will take all.” I arranged for a hospital plane to take us to Riverside next morning.
She didn’t want to go, but for once she was too weak to resist, and I was in a position to have my way. We had to make an early start because we had mountains to fly over, and when the sunwas up the rising air would make turbulence. At five o’clock in the morning Hunter was there, and we carried Craig to our car and drove her to the little airfield of the town, not much more than a cow pasture.
It was a four-hundred-mile trip, my first by air. We flew over the road I had driven many times, and it was fascinating to see it from above. I told Craig about the sights; but, alas, she hadn’t much interest. At the airport there was an ambulance waiting, and soon she was in a hospital bed.
I doubt if anybody in the hospital had ever heard of the rice diet, and it was hard to get a large plate of well-cooked rice without gravy or butter on it. In fact, it was hard to get anything that Craig wanted, including quiet; but even so, the miracle began right away. She got well and was able to breathe lying down. After a couple of weeks she was able to walk a little.
My mind turned to that little cottage up in the Corona hills only seven miles away. In that cottage there would be no nurses gossiping outside her door at midnight. I would be the one to take care of her, and I would move on tiptoe whenever she slept. I persuaded her to let me take her there; the doctor consented, on condition that I bring her down twice a week for the blood tests that were necessary—to make sure that the supply of salt in her blood wasn’t below the minimum required. I promised so to do.
So for half a year more we lived in that cottage. I was nurse, cook, housemaid, chauffeur, and guardian angel. I cooked a pot and a half of rice for Craig every day, and she was so well that it was a miracle. Even the cautious doctor had to use extravagant language when he set the newest x-ray photograph beside the earliest one. I said to him, “Don’t you think that is remarkable?” His answer was, “I should say it is spectacular.”
The results of the rice-and-fruit diet were so spectacular that I decided to try it myself. I didn’t want to bother with blood tests, so I added celery to the diet—it is a vegetable of which I happen to be fond, and it gave me what I thought was the necessary bulk for safety. I added a spoonful of dried-milk powder for a little more salt. We were both having large quantities of fruitjuice, mine being pineapple because it is the sweetest. Both of us took vitamins.
Throughout most of my writing life, certainly for a half century of it, I had been accustomed to say that I was never more than twenty-four hours ahead of a headache. But from the time I adopted the diet of rice and fruit, which I still follow, I ceased to have headaches, and I have even forgotten, now, what a headache feels like. Nor have I had any other ailment, not even a cold.
But to return to my story. With the good doctor’s permission I took Craig back to our Monrovia home, and we got some apparatus that was supposed to take the smog out of our bedrooms. We lived there in peace and happiness for a while; but then Craig discovered that she could no longer bear to eat any more rice. She began trying all other kinds of health foods, in particular bread stuffs that were supposed to be low in salt. Also, she could no longer stand the blood tests, because the nurses couldn’t find the vein in one wrist, and the other wrist had become sore from too much puncturing.
So all the heart troubles came back; and there was something worse, called fibrillation—an endless quivering of the heart that was most distressing and kept her awake at night. I had gotten an oxygen tank; she would call me, and I would get up and put the little cap over her nose and turn on the valve and wait until she had had enough, and then turn off the valve and go back to bed and sleep, if I could, until she called again. Neither of us wanted a stranger in the house, so I had her sole care. I cooked her food, served it, and cleaned up afterward.
Every day I took her outdoors. I took care of her flower beds, and she would gaze at them with rapture—her poppies, her big red rosebush, her camellia bush that bloomed every April, and a wonderful golden oleander that bloomed all summer.
Every night I put her to sleep with prayers. “Dear God, make her well,” was what I wanted to say over and over again, but Craig insisted it must be, “Dear God, makeuswell.” I didn’t need any help so far as I could see, but I said it her way; when the fibrillations got bad, I would say it over a hundred times, ormaybe two hundred, until at last she went to sleep. I could never tell when she was asleep; so I would let my voice die away softly, and wait and see if she spoke.
That was our life for several years. Every now and then I would try to persuade her to have some rice, just a little at a time; and that little, alas, was not enough. She was tired of it and forbade me to mention it. Month after month her condition got worse, her pain harder to endure. The kind doctor would try pills with some new outlandish name, and I would get the prescription filled and do my best to learn which was which.
It was during this period of long-drawn-out pain and struggle that Craig wrote the beautiful book,Southern Belle. She wrote about herself and her lovely childhood and girlhood, all because I pleaded with her to do it. She wrote about her life with me, because she wanted to set me straight with the world. Sometimes I would sit by the bed, and write to her dictation; but most of the time she would write lying in bed with her head propped forward, holding a pad with one hand and a pencil with the other.
It was a tiring position, and after she had been doing it for months, she developed a pain near the base of the spine. I knew from the beginning that it was a question of posture and tried to persuade her of that, but in vain. I would take her to specialists, and they would examine her and give their verdicts—and no two verdicts were the same. I am quite sure that none of these doctors had ever had a patient who had treated her spine in that fashion. Craig wouldn’t let me tell them; I wasn’t a specialist—only a husband—and I must not influence their judgment.
How many of these dreadful details shall I put into a book? Of course, anyone may skip them; but I had no way to skip them. Craig had stood by me through my ordeals, and she was all I had in this world—apart from the books I had written and the one I was writing. The only other person who could help us was Hunter, and he would arrive from Phoenix eight hours after I telephoned. He was there when Craig became delirious from pain or from the injections that the doctors had given her. He would comfort me when I, too, was on the verge of becoming deliriousat the sight of her suffering. She would say that she was suffering from cold and would have me pile every blanket in the house on top of her; then she would say that she was suffocating and would throw them all off. I remember a night of that, and then I could not sleep in the day. We had to have her taken to a hospital; and she hated hospitals, each one had been worse than the last.
I cannot bring myself to tell much about the end. I do not think that many could bear to read it. At times she became delirious, and wasn’t herself any more; I had to make up my mind to that. Then suddenly shewouldbe herself—her beautiful self, her dear, kind, loving self, her darling self, agonizing about me and what I was going to do, and how I could manage to survive in a dreadful world where everybody would be trying to rob me, to trap me, to take away the money that she had worked so desperately to keep me from spending.
Three times during that long ordeal I found her lying on the hard plastone floor of the upstairs kitchen that we had made for her. The first two times we were alone in the house, and since I could not lift her, I had to call the ambulance to get her back in bed. The second time she was unconscious, and I called the doctor again. He thought these were “light strokes,” and later on the autopsy confirmed the opinion; but she had not been told.
The third time was less than a month before the end. Her nephew, Leftwich Kimbrough, was with us, so we two carried her to bed. I sat by, keeping watch, and presently I heard her murmuring; I listened, and soon went and got a writing pad and pen. They were fragments of a poem she was composing while half-conscious, and I wrote what I heard:
Stay in their hearts, dear Jesus,Stay and make them kind.
Stay in their hearts, dear Jesus,Stay and make them kind.
Stay in their hearts, dear Jesus,Stay and make them kind.
And then, after an interval:
Oh, the poor lonely nigger,Bring love to his soul.
Oh, the poor lonely nigger,Bring love to his soul.
Oh, the poor lonely nigger,Bring love to his soul.
Later, I wrote underneath, for the record: “Craig’s murmured singing after bad fall. I mentioned to her, it was Good Friday Eve, 1961.”
You will recall my account of the visit of Judge Tom Brady, founder of the citizens’ councils all through the Deep South. From earliest childhood little Mary Craig Kimbrough had wrestled with that race problem of her homeland. She heard and saw both sides; the fears of the whites, for which they had reason, and the pitiful helplessness of the ignorant blacks. Now, in her last hours, she was pleading, in the first couplet for the whites whom she loved and in the second for the blacks, whom she also loved.
One day she would eat nothing but soft-boiled eggs, and the next day she would eat nothing but gelatine. So the icebox was full of eggs and then of gelatine. One elderly doctor told her that the best remedy for fibrillation was whisky; so here was I, a lifelong teetotaler who had made hatred of whisky a part of his religion, going out to buy it by the quart. Craig insisted that I should never buy it in Monrovia where I was known; I must drive out on one of the boulevards and stop in some strange place and pay for a bottle with some imbecile name that I forgot. That went on for quite a while, and the time came when Craig was so weak that I couldn’t manage to hold her up while she tried to walk the length of the room.
She wouldn’t let us call the doctor because he would order her to the hospital. But the time came when we had to call the doctor, and he called the ambulance, and poor Craig was carried away on her last ride. She was in the hospital for three weeks, and it cost us close to four thousand dollars. This seems an ungracious thing to mention, but I am thinking about what happens to the poor—how dotheydie? Perhaps they do it more quickly, and don’t have day and night nurses by their bedside. This sounds like irony, but I let it stand.
In addition to the nurses and the husband, there were Hunter and Sally, his wife, two nieces, and a sister who had come on from Alabama. What they saw was a hideously tormented human being. I pleaded with the doctor—surely there must besome ethical code that would give him the right to end such torment! But he said that stage had not yet been reached.
I won’t tell much about my own part in it. I would sit and gaze at the features of my beloved who no longer knew me; or if she did know me she was angry because I had let her be brought to the hospital. I would sit there blinded with my own tears, and then I would get up and try to get out of the hospital without making a spectacle of myself.
Why do I tell such a story? Well, it happened. It was life. It is our human fate. It happened to me, and it could happen to you. This universe is a mystery to me. How beauty, kindness, goodness, could have such an end visited upon it will keep me in agony of spirit for the rest of my days on this planet. I do not know what to make of it, and I can draw only this one moral from it: that nature has been, and can be, so cruel to us that surely we should busy ourselves not to commit cruelties against one another. I know that I had for half a century the love of one of the kindest, wisest, and dearest souls that ever lived upon this earth; why she should have died in such untellable horror is a question I ask of God in vain.
She died in St. Luke Hospital, Pasadena, on April 26, 1961. Her ashes were shipped to a brother in Greenwood, Mississippi, and were interred in a family plot in the cemetery in that town.
The death of Craig left me with a sense of desolation beyond my power to describe. Hunter and his wife Sally went back to Arizona. The sister and nieces scattered to their homes, and I was in that lovely old house in which every single thing spoke of the woman who had bought it, arranged it, used it—and would never see it again. I had lived in a town for twenty years and never entered a single home; I had no one to speak to but the clerks in the post office, the market, the bank. In my early days I would not have minded that; I had camped alone all summer, in a tent on an island in the St. Lawrence, and again in an “open camp” on an Adirondack lake, and had been perfectly happy. But I no longer had the firm conviction that the future of mankind depended upon the words I was putting on paper; on the contrary, I was obsessed by memories of horror, inescapable, inexcusable. The house was haunted—but I had no other place to go.
For more than seven years, ever since her first heart attack, Craig had been insisting that I could not live alone. It had become a sort of theme song: “Oh, what will you do? What will become of you? Youmustfind some woman to take care of you.” Then she would add, “Oh, don’t let some floozie get hold of you!” My answer was always the same: “I am going to take care of you and keep you alive.” But now she was gone, and I could say it no more.
We had friends, but they were mostly far away; elderly married couples who came to see us once or twice in a year: Sol Lesser, who had producedThunder Over Mexicofor us; Richard Otto, who had run the EPIC campaign for us; Harry Oppenheimer, New York businessman who had promised to come and run the state of California for me if I had had the misfortune to get elected. Now I spent several weeks wondering which of these good friends I should ask to help me find a wife.
For decades I had been a friend and supporter of theNew Leader; and every week had read the gay verses of Richard Armour. He had sent me his books, beginning withIt All Started with Columbus, and continuing withIt All Started with EveandIt All Started with Marx. I was so pleased that I wrote him some lines in his own style; I recall the last two lines:
And if you find that I’m a charmerYou’ll know that I’ve been reading Armour.
And if you find that I’m a charmerYou’ll know that I’ve been reading Armour.
And if you find that I’m a charmerYou’ll know that I’ve been reading Armour.
He is dean of Scripps College, some twenty miles east of my home; but for many years we did not meet. It happened that Hunter Kimbrough was a classmate of Frederick Hard, president of the college, and Hunter was in the habit of stopping by on his way to and from Arizona. He and Dick Armour became friends, and several months after Craig’s death, Hunter invited Dick and his wife to my home for a picnic lunch. So it was that I met Kathleen Armour, gracious, kind of heart and with a laugh as merry as her husband’s verses.
After days and nights of thinking about it, I composed a letter to Kathleen, putting my plight before her. The unmarried women I knew could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and not one of the four was suitable. In a woman’s college Kathleen must know many; I didn’t mean a pupil, but a teacher, or member of such a family.
I received a cordial reply, and soon I was invited to Kathleen’s home. There I met the sister of Hunter’s friend, Fred Hard, president of the college. She was a widow, and her years were seventy-nine, appropriate to my eighty-three. She was twice a mother, once a grandmother, and three times a great-grandmother. She was of a kind disposition, with a laugh as happy as Kathleen’s and an abundance of good sense. She was born in South Carolina and had lived in several parts of the UnitedStates. She was well read and was part of a cultured environment. She was staying in the lovely home of the college president, keeping it during summer while he and his wife were in Europe. Her name was May, and Dick Armour had written her some verses:
For her, two cities vie and jockey:First Claremont claims her, then Milwockey.The West and Middle West both crave her,To both she brings her special savor,For in the one or in the other’n,She’s still herself, completely Southern.But here alone we can rejoiceWith lifted hearts and lifted voiceAnd happily and smugly say:When it is August, we have May.
For her, two cities vie and jockey:First Claremont claims her, then Milwockey.The West and Middle West both crave her,To both she brings her special savor,For in the one or in the other’n,She’s still herself, completely Southern.But here alone we can rejoiceWith lifted hearts and lifted voiceAnd happily and smugly say:When it is August, we have May.
For her, two cities vie and jockey:First Claremont claims her, then Milwockey.The West and Middle West both crave her,To both she brings her special savor,For in the one or in the other’n,She’s still herself, completely Southern.But here alone we can rejoiceWith lifted hearts and lifted voiceAnd happily and smugly say:When it is August, we have May.
I invited her to my home. The large downstairs rooms were dark, she said; and I pointed out to her that the long velvet curtains could be thrown back. In the living room are four double windows, from floor almost to ceiling, and in the dining room are five more of the same; the rooms are practically one, because the wide double doors roll back into the walls. But she said she would be lonely in that half acre of gardens surrounded by a high hedge of two hundred eugenia trees. She said she might marry me if I would come to live in Claremont; but I saw myself living in a town full of college boys and girls who would come to ask for interviews, and who would consider me snobbish if I put a fence around my house. I do my work outdoors, weather permitting—as it does most of the time in southern California.
So, back I went to my lonely existence. Hunter was disturbed, for to him the Hard family represented the best of culture, that of the South. Maybe the Armours had something to do with it—I did not ask—but I met May at their house again, and she was cordial. More time passed, and there came a birthday letter, telling me of her interest in my work and wishing me happiness. So I went to see her again; this time I did not stand on ceremony, but put my arms around her, and it was all settled in a few minutes.
We were to be married in the Episcopal Church, and the rector was called in to hear my story. I had obtained a divorce half a century before, I being the innocent party in the suit. I had been remarried by an Episcopal clergyman, on the banks of the Rappahannock River—with jonquils blooming on the riverbank and behind me the heights on which twenty thousand Union soldiers had given their lives. The rector in Claremont said that if the church had given its sanction once, it would not refuse it again; so all was well.
We wanted the wedding as quiet as possible. All my life I have sought publicity—but for books and causes, not for myself, and if we could have had our way, no one but the family would have known. But the law in California requires that both parties appear at the county office building and sign an application for a license—and this two days before the marriage can take place. The license is valid anywhere in the state; so I had an idea: “Let’s go into another county, where there’s less chance of our being known.” We motored to San Bernardino, where two kind ladies gave us the blanks and instructions, and gave no sign that there was anything unusual about us. But soon after we got back to Claremont, the telephone calls began, and we knew that all the cats were out of the bag. Later we learned that courthouse reporters make it a practice to inspect the lists daily before closing time.
The clergyman had agreed that only members of the family and half a dozen invited friends were to be admitted: the Armours, of course, and the Sol Lessers, and the Richard Ottos of the far-off EPIC campaign. Dr. Hard gave his sister away, and the bride’s granddaughter, Barbara Sabin, was matron of honor. Hunter acted as my “best man.” The doors were guarded, and the morning ceremony was performed with the customary age-old dignity. But when the bride and groom emerged from a side door, there was what appeared to be a mob. A flood of questions was poured out, and cameras before our eyes were making little clicking noises. There was a crony of the far-off EPIC days, Hans Rutzebeck, a sailor who had written a grand book about his life,The Mad Sea. He had had plenty of time to talk to the reporters, and when I greeted him his claims of friendship were confirmed.
So the story was lively, and it appeared in all the evening papers. More detailed stories with photographs were in the morning papers all over the world. I do not exaggerate; friends, and strangers too, cut them out and sent them to us from half a dozen capitals of Europe, and from Brazil, Tokyo, India, Australia. College president’s sister, aged 79, marries muckrake man, aged 83—you can see how it was, and May was amused. She even got an album in which to keep the clippings for her great-grandchildren.
So this story has a happy ending. We both enjoy good health, and age does not bother us. We live with our books and papers in a wonderful fireproof house that a rich banker built, got tired of, and sold cheaply some twenty years ago. There is a half acre of land, completely surrounded by the hedge of eugenia trees. There are twenty-one kinds of fruit trees, and instead of lawns there are lantana and sweet alyssum, which do not have to be mowed. There is a camellia bush, and a golden oleander as big as a cottage; there are rosebushes, an iris bed, poppy beds that are a dream—and when I get tired of hammering on a typewriter, I go out and pull weeds from the poppies.
Now the house is fixed up May’s way; the velvet curtains are drawn back, and there are bright curtains and new paint in spots and everything is gay. Her friends come and carry her off to luncheons and musicales and exhibitions of paintings; in the evenings we read some of the fifty magazines that I take, or play the word game called Scrabble, which she has taught me. She is ahead one day, and I the next.
Ordinarily I do not attend luncheons or dinners—my diet of rice and fruit cuts down my social life. But as I write, my wife and I have just returned from a trip to the East that was one long round of luncheons and dinners. (I kept to my diet—and probably left a trail of puzzled waiters behind me.)
Some months ago the New York chapter of the American Newspaper Guild wrote to inform me that a Page One Award inLetters was to be presented to me and invited me to attend the ceremony late in April. Then, shortly afterward, came a letter from Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers, telling me that the UAW was also giving me an award—at its annual convention in Atlantic City early in May—and would like to present it to me in person. I could scarcely resist two such invitations.
The trip by air was a miracle to me. I had made only two short flights before. Now I saw the whole of the United States spread under me like a map, and I marveled at the nearness of the mountaintops and the vast spread of the plains. On the bare, brown deserts I observed great black spots, and I puzzled my head as to what could be growing on a desert floor; until I realized suddenly that these were the shadows of clouds, also beneath me. It was fascinating to observe how the shape of every spot corresponded exactly to the shape of its cloud. In the Middle West the farms were all laid out in perfect rectangles with the quarter sections clearly distinguishable; but as we got farther east, the irregularities increased until everything was chaos, including the roads.
All kinds of enterprises like to make use of celebrities, and the airport was no exception. The management, learning of my age, had taken the precaution to send a wheelchair to the plane. When May saw it she said to the porter, “You get in and let him wheel you.”
My son, David, was on hand with his wife and his car. An engineer, he publishes pamphlets about his technical discoveries of which his father is unable to understand a sentence. One of the problems he has solved is that of spinning a plastic thread so fine that one spool of it would reach all the way around the world. Both May and I are fortunate, in that we can love and admire our “in-laws.”
The American Newspaper Guild presented me with a handsome gold figure, which now stands on our mantel. The citation runs as follows:
Page One Award in Letters to Upton Sinclair, author of hundreds of books and papers, includingThe JungleandThe Brass Check, over a span of 60 years, all of which contributed immeasurably to the advancement of democracy and public enlightenment. 1962.
Page One Award in Letters to Upton Sinclair, author of hundreds of books and papers, includingThe JungleandThe Brass Check, over a span of 60 years, all of which contributed immeasurably to the advancement of democracy and public enlightenment. 1962.
Some sixteen hundred people were present, and I made a short speech.
A few days later David and his wife drove us down to Atlantic City, where the sixty-five hundred delegates of the United Automobile Workers throughout the world were having a week’s assembly. I had never met either Walter Reuther or his younger brother, Victor, and this was a pleasant occasion for both me and my family. Present also was Michael Angelo Musmanno, who as a young lawyer had plunged into a last-hour effort to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti. A wonderfully kindhearted and exuberant person, now close to the seventies, he has become a judge of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. When I asked him how this miracle had come about, he answered with a smile: “It is an elective office.”
On a Sunday evening we found ourselves confronting the sixty-five hundred cheering delegates, many of whom no doubt had readFlivver King. It was a dinner affair, and I found myself seated between my wife and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, whom I had not seen since a visit to the White House in 1935, just after the EPIC campaign. There was plenty of time for conversation, especially since I had had my rice-and-fruit meal an hour or so earlier.
Walter Reuther presented to me the Social Justice Award of the United Automobile Workers—an ebony plaque that carries this citation:
With admiration and affection and in thankful appreciation for the great moral courage and social conscience that motivated your writings as you exposed the inhuman exploitation of labor in American industrial jungles. Your life and your work have contributed immeasurably to the extension of the frontiers ofSocial Justice. May 1962.
With admiration and affection and in thankful appreciation for the great moral courage and social conscience that motivated your writings as you exposed the inhuman exploitation of labor in American industrial jungles. Your life and your work have contributed immeasurably to the extension of the frontiers ofSocial Justice. May 1962.
In my speech of acceptance I told how I had made a socialist, or a near-socialist, out of Henry Ford’s wife; and how, when he saw that he could not win the strike, he made all his plans to close up his plants—and was only deterred from it at the last moment by his wife’s announcement that if he carried out thisevil purpose she would leave him. The story was new to those delegates, and I will not attempt to describe the enthusiasm with which they received it.
Mrs. Roosevelt also gave one of her warm-hearted talks, and so it was a worthy occasion to those labor men and their wives. I imagined that newspaper readers might also be interested in it, but I examined the New York morning and afternoon papers and discovered that they had nothing whatever to say about the affair. I am used to newspaper silence about my doings, but I had really thought they would have something to say about the eloquence of Eleanor Roosevelt, and of the welcome she had received from that vast throng. But not one word in the Monday morning and afternoon papers! I paid a call on the labor editor of the New YorkTimes, and he was cordial—he took me about and introduced me to several other editors—but he had nothing to say about the paper’s failure to say anything about the UAW assemblage.
The award from the UAW included a check for a thousand dollars. I had written Walter that I would use the money to put a copy ofFlivver Kingin the libraries of all the branches of the union throughout the world. In Atlantic City Victor Reuther told me that they planned to reissueFlivver Kingthemselves and make it available to all their members. So I shall use the money to put in the union libraries copies of this present book and of the memorial edition ofSouthern Belle.
Meanwhile, in New York, I met many old friends. Also, I was asked to appear on several TV programs, and my interviews with Eric Goldman, Mike Wallace, and Barry Gray were great fun. One of the most unusual occasions was a luncheon given by my faithful agent, Bertha Klausner, who invited only those people who are working, in one way or another, with my various books—publishing or reissuing or dramatizing them for stage or screen. And there was a roomful of them!
Happily, there seems to be a revival of interest in my books.The Jungleis now in paperback, and students are reading it and teachers are talking about it in their classes.World’s EndandDragon’s Teeth, two of the Lanny Budd volumes, are also in paperback. So isManassas, under the title ofTheirs Be the Guilt.Mental Radio, my precise and careful study of Craig’s demonstrations of her telepathic power, has just been reissued by a publisher of scientific books, with the original preface by William McDougall and, in addition, the preface that Albert Einstein wrote for the German edition.The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of Social Protestis to be republished with modern additions. AndA Personal Jesus, an attempt at a modern insight, is also being reissued.
Our Ladyis being dramatized.Another Pamelais being converted into a musical comedy. Walt Disney is now setting out to make a movie ofThe Gnomobile, my story for children, which is also going to be reissued with gay illustrations from the French edition. And there is to be a TV series drawn from the Lanny Budd books. I cannot attempt to control this last and can only hope for the best.
A reader of this manuscript asked the question: “Just what do you think you have accomplished in your long lifetime?” I give a few specific answers.
I begin with a certainty. At the age of twenty-eight I helped to clean and protect the meat that comes to your table. I followed that matter through to the end. I put the shocking facts into a book that went around the world in both directions. I set forth the details at President Theodore Roosevelt’s lunch table in the White House, and later put them before his trusted investigators. I put their true report on the front page of the New YorkTimes, and I followed it up with letters to Congressmen. I saw the laws passed; from friends in the Chicago stockyards, I learned that they were enforced. The stockyard workers now have strong unions; I know some of their officials, and if the old conditions had come back, I would have been told of it and would be telling it here.
Second, I know that we still have many bad and prejudiced newspapers, but many are better than they were. I think thatThe Brass Checkhelped to bring about the improvement. It also encouraged newspapermen to form a union. And the guild, among other things, has improved the quality of newspapers.
Third, I know that our “mourning parade” before the offices of Standard Oil in New York not merely ended slavery in the mining camps in the Rocky Mountains but also changed the lifecourse of the Rockefeller family; and this has set an example to others of our millionaire dynasties—including the Armours and the Fords.
Fourth, I think that Mary Craig Sinclair, with my help, did much to promote an interest in the investigation of psychic phenomena. Professor William McDougall, an Englishman who became known as “the dean of American Psychology,” told us that it was Craig’s demonstrations that decided him to set up the department of parapsychology at Duke University. It was McDougall who appointed J. B. Rhine, and the work that has been done by these two men has made the subject respectable.Mental Radiois now issued by a scientific publishing house.
Fifth, I know that the American Civil Liberties Union, which I helped to organize in New York and of which I started the southern California branch in 1923, has put an end to the oppression of labor in California and made it no longer possible to crowd six hundred strikers into a jail built to hold one hundred.
Sixth, I know that the EPIC campaign of 1934 in California changed the whole reactionary tone of the state. We now have a Democratic governor and a Democratic state legislature, and the Republicans are unhappy. In the depression through which we passed in 1961, no one died of starvation.
Seventh, I know that I had something to do with the development and survival of American democratic ideas, both political and social, in Japan. From 1915 on, practically every book I wrote was translated and published in Japan, and I was informed that a decade or two in that country were known as theSinkuru Jidai, which means “the Sinclair Era.” Every one of the Lanny Budd books was a best seller there; and in September 1960, when the Japanese students appeared on the verge of a procommunist revolution, my faithful translator, Ryo Namikawa, cabled, begging me to send a message in favor of the democratic process of social change. I paid over four hundred dollars to send a cablegram toShimbun, the biggest newspaper in Japan, and it appeared on the front page the next day. Of course, I cannot say how much that had to do with it. I only know that the students turned away from their communist leadership and chose the democratic process and friendship with America.
Eighth, my two books on the dreadful ravages of alcoholismmay have had some effect. The second, calledThe Cup of Fury, was taken up by the church people, and it has sold over a hundred thousand copies. I get many letters about it.
Ninth. Way back in the year 1905, I started the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, now the League of Industrial Democracy. I had had nine years of college and university, and I hadn’t learned that the modern socialist movement existed. I held that since the educators wouldn’t educate the students, it was up to the students to educate the educators—and this was what happened, partly because so many of our students of those days are educators now.
Tenth and last, there are the Lanny Budd books. They won the cordial praise of George Bernard Shaw (who made them the basis for recommending me for the Nobel Prize), H. G. Wells, Albert Einstein, and Thomas Mann. I worked at those books like a slave for a dozen years, and if they contain errors of historical fact, these have not been pointed out. The books have been translated into a score of languages. They contain the story of the years from 1911 to 1950, and I hope they have spread a little enlightenment through the world.
The English Queen Mary, who failed to hold the French port of Calais, said that when she died, the word “Calais” would be found written on her heart. I don’t know whether anyone will care to examine my heart, but if they do they will find two words there—“Social Justice.” For that is what I have believed in and fought for during sixty-three of my eighty-four years.
In politics and economics, I believe what I have believed ever since I discovered the socialist movement at the beginning of this century. I have incorporated those beliefs in a hundred books and pamphlets and numberless articles. My books have been translated into forty languages, and millions of people have read them. What those millions have found is not only a defense of social justice but an unwavering conviction that true social justice can be achieved and maintained only through the democratic process. The majority of my books have been translated and published in communist lands; of course, it may be that thetexts have been altered. If they were published as I wrote them, their readers learned the ideals of democratic freedom.
Despite my fight and the struggles of many others, communist dictatorships have taken over half the world. Meanwhile, for the first time, proud man, dressed with a little brief authority, has so perfected the instruments of destruction that he is in a position to put an end to the possibility of life on our earth and condemn this planet to go its way through infinite space, lonely and forgotten. Whether this will happen depends entirely upon the decision of two men—or possibly on the decision of one of them. Both are known to the world by one initial, “K.” What can a poor fellow whose name happens to begin with “S” do about it? He can only say what he thinks and hope to be heard. He can only go on fighting for social justice and the democratic ideal, hope that man does not destroy himself, by design or by accident, and trust that eventually the peoples of the world will force their rulers to follow the ways of peace, of freedom, and of social justice.
Springtime and Harvest 1901 (Reissued asKing Midas 1901)The Journal of Arthur Stirling 1903Prince Hagen 1903Manassas: A Novel of the War 1904 (Reissued asTheirs Be the Guilt 1959)A Captain of Industry 1906The Jungle 1906The Industrial Republic 1907The Overman 1907The Metropolis 1908The Moneychangers 1908Samuel the Seeker 1910The Fasting Cure 1911Love’s Pilgrimage 1911Plays of Protest 1912The Millennium: A Comedy of the Year 2000 1912Sylvia 1913Damaged Goods 1913Sylvia’s Marriage 1914The Cry for Justice 1915King Coal 1917The Profits of Religion 1918Jimmie Higgins 1919The Brass Check 1919100%: The Story of a Patriot 1920The Book of Life 1921They Call Me Carpenter 1922The Goose-Step 1923Hell: A Verse Drama and Photoplay 1923The Goslings 1924Singing Jailbirds: A Drama in Four Acts 1924The Pot Boiler 1924Mammonart 1925Bill Porter: A Drama of O. Henry in Prison 1925The Spokesman’s Secretary 1926Letters to Judd 1926Oil! 1927Money Writes! 1927Boston 1928Mountain City 1930Mental Radio 1930, 1962Roman Holiday 1931The Wet Parade 1931American Outpost 1932Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox 1933The Way Out 1933I, Governor of California—and How I Ended Poverty 1933The Epic Plan for California 1934I, Candidate for Governor—and How I Got Licked 1935We, People of America 1935Depression Island 1935What God Means to Me 1936Co-op 1936The Gnomobile 1936, 1962Wally for Queen 1936The Flivver King 1937No Pasaran 1937Little Steel 1938Our Lady 1938Terror in Russia 1938Expect No Peace 1939Letters to a Millionaire 1939Marie Antoinette 1939Telling the World 1939Your Million Dollars 1939World’s End 1940World’s End Impending 1940Between Two Worlds 1941Peace or War in America 1941Dragon’s Teeth 1942Wide Is the Gate 1943Presidential Agent 1944Dragon Harvest 1945A World to Win 1946Presidential Mission 1947A Giant’s Strength 1948Limbo on the Loose 1948One Clear Call 1948To the Editor 1948O Shepherd, Speak! 1949Another Pamela 1950The Enemy Had It Too 1950A Personal Jesus 1952The Return of Lanny Budd 1953What Didymus Did 1955The Cup of Fury 1956It Happened to Didymus 1958Theirs Be the Guilt 1959My Lifetime in Letters 1960Affectionately Eve 1961
A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,R,S,T,U,V,W,Y.