V

Ez fer war, I call it murder—There you hev it plain an’ flat.

—although I don’t think Mrs. Gartz had ever heard ofThe Biglow Papers.

Like all the other liberals, radicals, and socialists, I was bitterly disappointed by the settlement to which President Wilson consented in Paris. It seemed to us that our hopes had been betrayed, and it seemed to Mrs. Gartz that her seditious opinions had been vindicated. But nothing made any difference in our friendship, or interrupted the flow of checks to help keep the magazine going.

The checks brought one amusing development before long: the president of Pasadena’s biggest bank invited Mrs. Gartz to remove her account from his institution. Whether that had ever happened in the banking world before I do not know. Checkspayable to Mary Craig Sinclair were poisonous or incendiary. I might add that in the new bank Craig deposited a thousand-dollar bond that Mrs. Gartz had brought to her personally, in return for some writing Craig had done for her. “Don’t let Mr. Sinclair get hold of it,” said Mrs. Gartz, “or he’ll spend it all on the magazine. Go down to the bank and rent a safe-deposit box and hide it away.”

Since Craig could feel that she had earned this bond, she took Mrs. Gartz’s advice. Some months later, she went down to the bank to get the bond and discovered that the box was empty. In the normal course of events she would have reported the matter to the head of the bank; but she would have had to tell him where she had got the bond, and she did not care to do that. She took the loss quietly and did not tell her too-generous friend.

While editing and publishing the magazine, I was also writing a new novel based on my experiences in the Socialist Party, of which I had been a member for a couple of decades. I had known all kinds of picturesque characters and types, and heard stories of their adventures. A Socialist Party candidate for vice president, Ben Hanford, had invented the name “Jimmie Higgins” for the humble worker in the party who makes no speeches and gets no honors but does the tiresome jobs of addressing envelopes, distributing literature, and making house-to-house calls to bring his fellow workers to meetings. I took this character for my hero, and started the publication ofJimmie Higginsin the magazine.

When in 1919 our Army made its somewhat crazy landing on the shores of the Archangel Peninsula, as a start to putting down the Bolshevik movement in Russia, I decided to change the tone of my novel at the end. So far Jimmie had been a socialist patriot and had loyally gone to war; but now he turned into a malcontent, to be jailed and tortured. I recall that some reviewer in the New YorkTimesrebuked me severely for this seditious invention; but it wasn’t long afterward that the New YorkTimesitself was reporting just such incidents as having happened in the Army at Archangel. When I wrote to theTimespointing out these details, my letter was ignored.

In this magazine I had all kinds of fun. I got letters of praise and letters of fury, and published them side by side. The morebad names I was called, the more amusing I found it; and my readers let me know that they too enjoyed it. I sent the magazine to well-known persons, got responses pro and con, and published them. H. G. Wells wrote a gay letter. I published it in facsimile, and somebody wrote asking me please to supply a translation. Socialists denounced me as a renegade; patriots denounced me as a traitor—and I printed the letters along with those of Colonel House, Senator John Sharp Williams, and other patriots of repute.

All this labor was wearing on my brain and my stomach, as well as my purse. Then suddenly I thought of a solution. Emanuel Haldeman-Julius had taken over theAppeal of Reasonand changed its name to theHaldeman-Julius Weekly. He had a circulation of something like half a million, whereasUpton Sinclair’shad succeeded in getting only ten thousand. I was always lured by a larger audience, and I made him a proposition to merge my magazine with his. He would let me have one full page called “Upton Sinclair’s,” in which I would say what I pleased. The serial I was writing would fill part of the page, which was newspaper size, and I could supply material similar to the contents of my magazine to fill the rest of the page. So it was agreed, and instead of having a monthly deficit I would have an income of fifty dollars a week. At least it was enough to pay the secretary who was taking my dictation. Also, it was a load off the mind of my overburdened wife; and if any of my subscribers complained, I could remind them that they had never offered to pay my printer’s bill.

For all my thinking lifetime I had been making tests of the big-business press of America. Almost everywhere it was on the side of privilege and exploitation, almost nowhere was it alert to the interest of democratic freedom. I had made notes and had envelopes full of clippings, and a head full of memories and a heart full of rage. I decided that I would put all that into a book and use the huge circulation I had got from that four-page Kansas weekly paper.

Seeking a title, I went back to the days of my youth when I had joined in the election campaign against Tammany Hall. William Travers Jerome had told about the wholesale prostitution that was protected because of graft paid to the police department. The “price of a woman’s shame” was a brass check purchased at the entrance. Jerome had based his whole campaign upon it, and it struck me thatThe Brass Checkwas a fine title for a book about the prostitution of the press. I made the term known not merely to all America but to Europe as well, for the book was translated into many languages. It was a book of facts that no one could dispute, because I had saved the clippings, and I verified every story that I told.

It happened that an old friend was spending the winter in a cottage at our fashionable hotel. Samuel Untermyer, whom I had met through Lincoln Steffens, had been the highest-paid corporation lawyer in New York. Now he was an old man, tired—except for his tongue. He could tell more terrible stories of corruption than anyone I ever knew, and he had told some to me when I visited his home up the Hudson and inspected the orchids that decorated every room.

I took him the manuscript ofThe Brass Check. When he had read it, he said, “Upton, you can’t possibly publish that book. It contains a score of criminal libels and a thousand civil suits.” I said, “I am going to publish it and take the consequences.”

In Hammond, Indiana, I had found a large printing concern that had printed my book,The Profits of Religion, and made no objection. Now with some qualms I sent them the bulky “criminal” manuscript. To my surprise they made no comment, but quoted a price and proceeded to send me proofs.

I remember an amusing episode. The elderly treasurer of the company paid a visit to California and asked to see me. He came, and I learned to what I owed the honor. He said, very mildly, that he had recently discovered that I had run up a debt of twenty thousand dollars, and he wondered if I realized how much money that was. I told him that I had never had such a debt in my life hitherto, but that the book was selling well and the money would come in installments; and it did.

The book was published serially in theAppeal, and I was really surprised by the result. I had never had so many letters or so many orders. I knew that this time I had a real best seller. When I got the finished books, I gave a copy to my old friend, Gaylord Wilshire, who had made his home in Pasadena. He threw me into a panic when he phoned to tell me that it was inconceivable that the publication of this book would be permitted in America. He urged me to get all my copies distributed at once to socialist and labor groups and bookstores, and tell them to hide the books. I took this seriously and did as he suggested. It was an easy way to get rid of books, but a hard way to make money.

I had to have more paper; when I applied to the wholesalers I was told there was no paper on the market. World War I had caused a shortage of everything. The big concerns had their contracts, of course, and were getting their paper; but there was none left over for a little fellow like the author ofThe Brass Check.

I wrote to every wholesale paper dealer in the United States, but got no response. I took my lamentations into the city of Los Angeles, and there made a surprising discovery. There was a kind of paper called Kraft—otherwise known as plain brown wrapping paper. I could get it in a light weight, and it was possible to read print on it.

Nobody in the world had ever thought to print a book on it; but I got the price for a carload, six thousand dollars, and went back home and laid siege to my old friend, Sam Untermyer. I pointed out to him that I hadn’t been arrested, and I hadn’t even had a civil suit threatened; so I begged him to lend me six thousand dollars. I made him so ashamed of his misjudgment as a lawyer that he actually wrote me a check. He was quite pathetic when he told me how necessary it was that he should get it back (He did.)

The book created a tremendous sensation and, of course, no end of controversy. I won’t go into the details because the stories are old—and many of the newspapers have learned something about ethics. I venture to think that reporters all over the country read the book and took courage from it. Many of them are now editors, and while they still have to “take policy,” they don’t take it quite so completely.

I had called upon them to form a union to protect their rights, and this they promptly did—but they preferred to call it a guild, which is more aristocratic. Now the guild has branches all over the country and has had some effect in establishing standards of professional decency. While I was completing this book their New York chapter invited me to come and receive an award.

Next book:The Goose-Step. In the early spring of 1922 I left my long-suffering wife in charge of my office with an elderly secretary and three or four assistants, while I took a tour all over the United States, going first to the Northwest, then across to Chicago, New York, and Boston, then back through the Middle West and Southwest. I had been through five years of City College and four years of postgraduate work at Columbia, and had come out unaware that the modern socialist movement existed.So now I meant to muckrake the colleges, showing where they had got their money and how they were spending it. I had jotted down the names of discontented schoolteachers and college professors who had written to me, or whose cases had become known; I visited some thirty cities, and in each of them some educator had assembled the malcontents in his or her home, and I sat and made notes while they told me their angry or hilarious stories.

There were many comical episodes on my tour. The University of Wisconsin had been liberal in the days of Robert LaFollette; but now it had a reactionary president, and I had a lively time with him. I had applied for the use of a hall, and he had already announced that he wouldn’t grant it. He referred me to the board of regents, and I had a session with them. I finally got the use of the gymnasium, and the newspaper excitement brought a couple of thousand students to ask me questions for an hour after my talk. The concluding paragraph of my Wisconsin story was as follows:

Next afternoon I met the champion tennis team of the university, and played each of the pair in turn and beat them in straight sets; I was told that the student body regarded this as a far more sensational incident than my Socialist speech. An elderly professor came up to me on the campus next day—I had never seen him before, and didn’t know his name; he assured me with mock gravity that I had made a grave blunder—I should have played the tennis matches first, and made the speech second, and no building on the campus would have been big enough to hold the crowd.

From Wisconsin I went on to Chicago, to what I called the University of Standard Oil. The students had a hymn that they sang there:

Praise God from whom oil blessings flow,Praise Him, oil creatures here below,Praise Him above, Ye Heavenly Host,Praise Father, Son—but John the most.

I interviewed the president there, and he granted me the use of a small hall. When I assured him I would need a larger one, he refused to believe me; so I found myself quite literally packed in, with students climbing into the windows and sitting on thesills and standing in the corridors. Just outside the hall I had noticed a beautiful quadrangle with lovely soft grass and plenty of room. I suggested that we all move out onto the grass and that somebody find me a soapbox to stand on—the classical pulpit of radical orators. There were loud cheers, and we moved outside. Still more people came running, and I talked to the crowd for an hour or two and answered questions for an hour or two more. Everybody had a good time except the Standard Oil president.

The next day I played the tennis champion of that university, and I have to record that he beat me—but with an effort so mighty that he split his pants.

One of the cities was my birthplace, Baltimore, and one of my sources there was Elizabeth Gilman, daughter of the founder of Johns Hopkins University. She filled her home with professors one day and with schoolteachers the next, and they told me their troubles.

I have mentioned my friendship with Mencken. It began by mail; he was a tireless letter writer. There are some two hundred letters from him in the collection of my papers in the Lilly Library of the University of Indiana. He liked to write little short notes—he had secretaries and kept them busy. He didn’t care in the least what he said—provided only that it was funny. The more extravagant, the more fun; and the more seriously you took it, the still greater fun. When I was in New York, I called at theAmerican Mercuryoffice, and his conversation was just like his letters.

Now he had retired, and I visited his home in Baltimore—like Uncle Bland’s, it was one of those brick houses, four stories high, apparently built a whole block at a time in solid, uniform rows, each house with three or four white marble steps up to the front door. Mencken poured out his Jovian thunderbolts for a whole afternoon. This was the longest time I had with him, and the most diverting.

Uncle Bland, as I have already related, was the founder and president of the United States Fidelity and Guaranty Companyand had become one of the most important men in Baltimore—but he had never met his “Sunpaper” editor. He insisted that I invite Mencken out to Catonsville, his summer home, for dinner. For this occasion my cousin Howard Bland sent his wife and children over to the “big house,” and we four men had Howard’s dining room for the evening.

It wasn’t a pleasant occasion for me because the other three spent most of the time discussing the various brands of wines, brandies, and whiskies. Partly, of course, it was done to “kid” me. It was the time of prohibition, and Uncle Bland had a tragic experience to report. He had foreseen the trouble coming and had a large stock safely locked up in his cellar; but while he was in his town house for the winter, the cellar door was pried open, and everything was carted away in the night. Everybody but me was grieved.

I had shipped home various boxes containing documents. I came back and for several months labored and wroteThe Goose-Step. As usual, I was warned about libel; but, as usual, it did not happen.

The Goose-Step, a big book, 488 pages, price two dollars, was published in 1923, and I assure you the college professors read it—and talked about it, even out loud. I could get paper this time, and filled all the orders, some twenty thousand copies. Then I wroteThe Goslings, 454 pages, price two dollars, telling about schools of all sorts; the teachers read it, and many had the courage to write to me. I had given them weapons to fight with, or perhaps lanterns to light with; anyhow, I have seen changes in America, and I tell myself I have helped a little to bring them about.

It was in that period that the American Civil Liberties Union was started; I joined at once, and attended weekly luncheons of its directors when I was in New York. Whether we had supported the war or opposed it, we all supported our right to say what we thought and our willingness to let the other fellow do the same. Among those I knew best were Roger Baldwin, who became a civil-liberties hero and devoted his life to the cause;Oswald Garrison Villard, publisher ofThe Nation, who remained a pacifist even in the face of Kaiser Wilhelm; and B. W. Huebsch, then a publisher on his own, and later editorial head of Viking Press; he was my guide and mentor through the eleven Lanny Budd volumes, about which I shall tell.

Also, there was W. J. Ghent, author ofOur Benevolent Feudalism. He and I got into an argument over the war in the columns ofThe Nation. The argument got too hot for Villard, and he wouldn’t publish my reply; so I paid for a page advertisement inThe Nationand had my say. I remember Ghent’s published comment: “Sinclair has taken the argument into the advertising columns, where I am unable to follow.” After that, I was summoned to a luncheon with Villard and Huebsch and very gently asked to call off the war—that is, the Ghent War.

Not long afterward came the founding of the Southern California branch of the ACLU, a drama in which I had the leading role. It began when I tried to read the Constitution of the United States at a meeting on private property that had been organized on behalf of workers who were on strike at San Pedro Harbor. I was arrested after the third sentence. When I got out of jail, I wrote a letter to Louis D. Oaks, chief of police in Los Angeles. It was printed as a leaflet and widely circulated in Los Angeles. It was also printed inThe Nationof June 6, 1923, along with an editorial note. I’m going to reprint that page fromThe Nation, partly because it tells the story, but mainly because it conveys so vividly the atmosphere of that period and the repression and brutality that went on then—which a new generation might find hard to credit.

In refusing to bow to the police of Los Angeles, who in the harbor strike have been the servile tools of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association, Upton Sinclair is strictly and legally a defender of the law against those who would violate it. And it is doubly to his praise that in this case he, a civilian, happens to be defending the law against the men who are sworn and paid to uphold it and have all the power of constituted authority on their side. The facts are undisputed: the police arrested Mr. Sinclair and his associates onprivate property, where they had assembled with the written consent of the owner. The law gives a police officer the right to enter private property only in two cases: if he has a warrant of arrest, or if a felony is actually being committed. Neither of these excuses existed in Los Angeles. The persons interfered with would have been legally justified in dealing with the police as violently as with a thief or kidnapper. We print below Mr. Sinclair’s letter to the chief of police of Los Angeles because it is a recital of facts which our readers should know and a nobly patriotic protest which should have their support.Pasadena, California, May 17, 1923

Pasadena, California, May 17, 1923

Louis D. Oaks,Chief of Police, Los AngelesHaving escaped from your clutches yesterday afternoon, owing to the fact that one of your men betrayed your plot to my wife, I am now in position to answer your formal statement to the public, that I am “more dangerous than 4,000 I.W.W.” I thank you for this compliment, for to be dangerous to lawbreakers in office such as yourself is the highest duty that a citizen of this community can perform.In the presence of seven witnesses I obtained from Mayor Cryer on Tuesday afternoon the promise that the police would respect my constitutional rights at San Pedro, and that I would not be molested unless I incited to violence. But when I came to you, I learned that you had taken over the mayor’s office at the Harbor. Now, from your signed statement to the press, I learn that you have taken over the district attorney’s office also; for you tell the public: “I will prosecute Sinclair with all the vigor at my command, and upon his conviction I will demand a jail sentence with hard labor.” And you then sent your men to swear to a complaint charging me with “discussing, arguing, orating, and debating certain thoughts and theories, which thoughts and theories were contemptuous of the constitution of the State of California, calculated to cause hatred and contempt of the government of the United States of America, and which thoughts and theories were detrimental and in opposition to the orderly conduct of affairs of business, affecting the rights of private property and personal liberty, and which thoughts and theories were calculated to cause any citizen then and there present and hearing the same to quarrel and fight and use force and violence.” And this although I told you at least a dozen times in your office that my only purpose was to stand on private property with the written permission of the owner, and there to read the Constitution of the United States; and you perfectly well know that I did this, and only this, and that three sentences from the Bill of Rights of the Constitution was every word that I was permitted to utter—the words being those which guarantee “freedom of speech and of the press, and the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for the redress of grievances.”But you told me that “this Constitution stuff” does not go at the Harbor. You have established martial law, and you told me that if I tried to read the Constitution, even on private property, I would be thrown into jail, and there would be no bail for me—and this even though I read you the provision of the State constitution guaranteeing me the right to bail. When you arrested me and my friends, you spirited us away and held us “incommunicado,” denying us what is our clear legal right, to communicate with our lawyers. All night Tuesday, and all day Wednesday up to four o’clock, you and your agents at the various jails and station-houses repeated lies to my wife and my attorneys and kept me hidden from them. When the clamor of the newspaper men forced you to let them interview me, you forced them to pledge not to reveal where I was. You had Sergeant Currie drive us up to Los Angeles, with strict injunctions not to get there before four o’clock—he did not tell me, but I heard another man give the order to him, and I watched his maneuvers to carry it out. It was your scheme to rush us into court at the last moment before closing, have lawyers appointed for us, and have us committed without bail, and then spirit us away and hide us again. To that end you had me buried in a cell in the city jail, and to my demands for counsel the jailers made no reply. Only the fact that someone you trusted tipped my wife off prevented the carrying out of this criminal conspiracy. My lawyers rushed to the jail, and forced the granting of bail, just on the stroke of five o’clock, the last moment.I charge, and I intend to prove in court, that you are carrying out the conspiracy of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association to smash the harbor strike by brutal defiance of law. I was in the office of I. H. Rice, president of this Association, and heard him getting his orders from Hammond of the Hammond Lumber Company, and heard his promise to Hammond that the job would be done without delay. It is you who are doing the job for Rice, and the cruelties you are perpetrating would shock this community if they were known, and they will be punished if there is a God in Heaven to protect the poor and friendless. You did all you could to keep me from contact with the strikers in jail; nevertheless I learned of one horror that was perpetrated only yesterday—fifty men crowded into one small space, and because they committed some slight breach of regulations, singing their songs, they were shut in this hole for two hours without a breath of air, and almost suffocated. Also I saw the food that these men are getting twice a day, and you would not feed it to your dog. And now the city council has voted for money to build a “bull-pen” for strikers, and day by day the public is told that the strike is broken, and the men, denied every civil right, have no place to meet to discuss theirpolicies, and no one to protect them or to protest for them. That is what you want—those are the orders you have got from the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association; the men are to go back as slaves, and the Constitution of the United States is to cease to exist so far as concerns workingmen.All I can say, sir, is that I intend to do what little one man can do to awaken the public conscience, and that meantime I am not frightened by your menaces. I am not a giant physically; I shrink from pain and filth and vermin and foul air, like any other man of refinement; also, I freely admit that when I see a line of a hundred policemen with drawn revolvers flung across a street to keep anyone from coming onto private property to hear my feeble voice, I am somewhat disturbed in my nerves. But I have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice. I intend to do my duty to my country. I have received a telegram from the American Civil Liberties Union in New York, asking me if I will speak at a mass meeting of protest in Los Angeles, and I have answered that I will do so. That meeting will be called at once, and you may come there and hear what the citizens of this community think of your efforts to introduce the legal proceedings of Czarist Russia into our free Republic.Upton Sinclair

Louis D. Oaks,Chief of Police, Los Angeles

Having escaped from your clutches yesterday afternoon, owing to the fact that one of your men betrayed your plot to my wife, I am now in position to answer your formal statement to the public, that I am “more dangerous than 4,000 I.W.W.” I thank you for this compliment, for to be dangerous to lawbreakers in office such as yourself is the highest duty that a citizen of this community can perform.

In the presence of seven witnesses I obtained from Mayor Cryer on Tuesday afternoon the promise that the police would respect my constitutional rights at San Pedro, and that I would not be molested unless I incited to violence. But when I came to you, I learned that you had taken over the mayor’s office at the Harbor. Now, from your signed statement to the press, I learn that you have taken over the district attorney’s office also; for you tell the public: “I will prosecute Sinclair with all the vigor at my command, and upon his conviction I will demand a jail sentence with hard labor.” And you then sent your men to swear to a complaint charging me with “discussing, arguing, orating, and debating certain thoughts and theories, which thoughts and theories were contemptuous of the constitution of the State of California, calculated to cause hatred and contempt of the government of the United States of America, and which thoughts and theories were detrimental and in opposition to the orderly conduct of affairs of business, affecting the rights of private property and personal liberty, and which thoughts and theories were calculated to cause any citizen then and there present and hearing the same to quarrel and fight and use force and violence.” And this although I told you at least a dozen times in your office that my only purpose was to stand on private property with the written permission of the owner, and there to read the Constitution of the United States; and you perfectly well know that I did this, and only this, and that three sentences from the Bill of Rights of the Constitution was every word that I was permitted to utter—the words being those which guarantee “freedom of speech and of the press, and the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for the redress of grievances.”

But you told me that “this Constitution stuff” does not go at the Harbor. You have established martial law, and you told me that if I tried to read the Constitution, even on private property, I would be thrown into jail, and there would be no bail for me—and this even though I read you the provision of the State constitution guaranteeing me the right to bail. When you arrested me and my friends, you spirited us away and held us “incommunicado,” denying us what is our clear legal right, to communicate with our lawyers. All night Tuesday, and all day Wednesday up to four o’clock, you and your agents at the various jails and station-houses repeated lies to my wife and my attorneys and kept me hidden from them. When the clamor of the newspaper men forced you to let them interview me, you forced them to pledge not to reveal where I was. You had Sergeant Currie drive us up to Los Angeles, with strict injunctions not to get there before four o’clock—he did not tell me, but I heard another man give the order to him, and I watched his maneuvers to carry it out. It was your scheme to rush us into court at the last moment before closing, have lawyers appointed for us, and have us committed without bail, and then spirit us away and hide us again. To that end you had me buried in a cell in the city jail, and to my demands for counsel the jailers made no reply. Only the fact that someone you trusted tipped my wife off prevented the carrying out of this criminal conspiracy. My lawyers rushed to the jail, and forced the granting of bail, just on the stroke of five o’clock, the last moment.

I charge, and I intend to prove in court, that you are carrying out the conspiracy of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association to smash the harbor strike by brutal defiance of law. I was in the office of I. H. Rice, president of this Association, and heard him getting his orders from Hammond of the Hammond Lumber Company, and heard his promise to Hammond that the job would be done without delay. It is you who are doing the job for Rice, and the cruelties you are perpetrating would shock this community if they were known, and they will be punished if there is a God in Heaven to protect the poor and friendless. You did all you could to keep me from contact with the strikers in jail; nevertheless I learned of one horror that was perpetrated only yesterday—fifty men crowded into one small space, and because they committed some slight breach of regulations, singing their songs, they were shut in this hole for two hours without a breath of air, and almost suffocated. Also I saw the food that these men are getting twice a day, and you would not feed it to your dog. And now the city council has voted for money to build a “bull-pen” for strikers, and day by day the public is told that the strike is broken, and the men, denied every civil right, have no place to meet to discuss theirpolicies, and no one to protect them or to protest for them. That is what you want—those are the orders you have got from the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association; the men are to go back as slaves, and the Constitution of the United States is to cease to exist so far as concerns workingmen.

All I can say, sir, is that I intend to do what little one man can do to awaken the public conscience, and that meantime I am not frightened by your menaces. I am not a giant physically; I shrink from pain and filth and vermin and foul air, like any other man of refinement; also, I freely admit that when I see a line of a hundred policemen with drawn revolvers flung across a street to keep anyone from coming onto private property to hear my feeble voice, I am somewhat disturbed in my nerves. But I have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice. I intend to do my duty to my country. I have received a telegram from the American Civil Liberties Union in New York, asking me if I will speak at a mass meeting of protest in Los Angeles, and I have answered that I will do so. That meeting will be called at once, and you may come there and hear what the citizens of this community think of your efforts to introduce the legal proceedings of Czarist Russia into our free Republic.

Upton Sinclair

The ending of this episode: We hired a good-sized hall in Los Angeles by the week and held crowded meetings every afternoon and evening. The Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union was formed, and a Congregational minister, Reverend Clinton J. Taft, resigned from his pulpit and served as director for the next twenty years or so. At the end of a couple of weeks the editor of the Los AngelesExaminercalled me on the telephone and said, “Sinclair, how long is this thing going on?” I answered, “Until we have civil liberties in Los Angeles.” “What, specifically, do you mean by that?” he asked, and I said, “For one thing, Chief Oaks must be kicked off the force; and we must have the assurance that there will never again be mass arrests of strikers.” The editor said, “You may count upon both these conditions being met.” I asked, “What guarantee have we?” He said, “I have talked it over with the half-dozen men who run this town, and I have their word. You may take mine.”

So we called off the meetings. A few days later we read in thenewspapers that Chief Oaks had been expelled from the force, having been found parked in his car at night with a woman and a jug of whisky. So far as I can recall, there have been no mass arrests of strikers in the past twenty-nine years.

Moved by the cruelties I had seen, I indulged myself in the pleasure of writing two radical plays—“radical” was a terrible word in those days.Singing Jailbirdsportrayed the Industrial Workers of the World, of whom we had met many; they sang in jail and were put “in the hole” for it. They were called “wobblies” because in the early days they had done their first organizing in a restaurant kept by an old Chinaman who could not say IWW but made it “I-wobble-wobble.”

I started with that scene, and then had the wobblies in jail recalling the battles they had fought and the evils they had suffered. There was a lot of singing all through, and the play made a hit when it was produced in Greenwich Village by a group of four young playwrights—one of them was Eugene O’Neill and another was John Dos Passos, who now after forty years has evolved from a rampant radical into a rampant conservative. I was writing for Bernarr Macfadden’sPhysical Culturein those days (at $150 per article). I took my boss to the show, and he put up a thousand dollars to keep it going. I, of course, got nothing.

The other play was in blank verse and was calledHell. It portrayed the devils as being bored, and amusing themselves by sending a messenger up to earth to create a great deposit of gold and set all the nations to warring over it. (This was just after World War I, of course.) My fastidious friend, George Sterling, was outraged by my verse, but I had a lot of fun. I found myself a solitary spot on the edge of the Arroyo Seco, and there paced up and down composing it and laughing over it. Dear old Art Young made a delightful cover drawing, and I published the play in pamphlet form; I still have copies, and—who can tell?—somebody might produce it before World War III comes and ends all producing.

Joking aside, I hope to live to see it.

The only house we went to in Pasadena was that of Mrs. Gartz. This was a couple of miles up the slope from our home, and occupied a whole block of beautiful grounds, like a park. The house was built around a central court containing palm trees, ornamental plants, and a swimming pool. On the front of the house was a wide veranda and a flight of stone steps. The veranda looked out over the whole of Pasadena, and it was a pleasant place to sit and listen to arguments over the future of mankind.

Every Sunday afternoon Mrs. Gartz would invite some lecturer, and after she met Craig, all these lectures dealt with the so-called radical movement. It appeared that when the very rich become radical they go the whole way. She became far more radical than we were, and it was Craig’s function to tone her down; but, alas, this service was not appreciated by Mrs. Gartz’s husband, who blamed us for all his troubles. I could tell many funny stories of those meetings in a millionaire’s palace with a raging millionaire husband roaming through the rooms, growling and grumbling to himself.

The whole of the class struggle was represented in that tormented home. Wobblies, when they got out of jail, would come and tell Mrs. Gartz their stories; the tears would come into her eyes, and she would write indignant letters to the newspapers—which the newspapers did not print. Also, there were the pacifists of all varieties, and later the communists, who finally “captured” the gullible great lady.

Mrs. Gartz took up the practice of writing to public officials about these outrages against civil liberty, and as her letters were not always coherent she would bring them to Craig to revise. Craig would take occasion to tone them down a bit; so presently she was in charge of all the great lady’s public relations. Craig hit upon the idea of publishing a little volume entitledLetters of Protest. This made a hit, and thereafter every year there would be a little volume that Mrs. Gartz distributed to everyone on her mailing list. In all there were seven pretty little books, and nodoubt they helped somewhat to diminish the stodginess of our millionaire city.

I have given a few glimpses of Mary Craig’s skill as a social practitioner. I must also tell a little about her as a homemaker.

To the north of the “brown house” we had bought, there extended seven lots rising slightly to a corner, from which the view over the Arroyo was still more attractive. Craig said nothing to me about her plans, but she bought those lots on installment payments. When I started the magazine it was on our dining-room table; so she went out traveling on foot about the town and found an old house that she bought for a hundred and fifty dollars and had moved onto the lot next to ours. She had a carpenter build a long table, and that was where the magazines were wrapped and prepared for the mail. One little cubbyhole in that house became my office, and several books were written there.

Of course, as the subscriptions came in we had to have still more help. We had no car in those days, but somehow Craig found another house and had it moved and connected up with the first one. Before she got through, she had bought four houses and fitted them in a row on two lots, and bought a fifth house to be wrecked for lumber to join the other houses together. I wrote an article about it in my magazine,Upton Sinclair’s, and printed a photograph of the houses.

It made a really funny story, because every house was a different color. I described the consternation of the neighbors; but they recovered when the job was finished, for Craig really made a beautiful home of it, with a long porch along the front and, of course, a uniform coat of paint. It was an especially good home for us because Craig could have her room at the south end and I could practice my violin at the north end.

There was an old carpenter named Judd Fuller who worked for Craig, making old houses into new. Many a time I sat on a roof with him, nailing down shingles; and all the time we talked politics, and the state of the world. I tried to make a socialist out of an old-style American individualist, and I learned how to dealwith that kind of mind. Some years later I wrote a pamphlet calledLetters to Judd, and of course made him very proud. I printed something over a hundred thousand of the pamphlet, and with the help of Haldeman-Julius distributed them over the country.

I decided to muckrake world literature. I had read a mass of it in the one language my mother had taught me, in the three that my professors had failed to teach me—Latin, Greek and German—and in the two I had taught myself—French and Italian. To me literature was a weapon in the class struggle—of the master class to hold its servants down, and of the working class to break its bonds. In other words, I studied world literature from the socialist point of view.

That had been done here and there in spots; but so far as I knew it had not been done systematically, and so far as I know it has not been done since. Of course,Mammonartwas ridiculed by the literary authorities; and of course I expected that. It was all a part of the class struggle, and I had set it forth in the book. Great literature is a product of the leisure classes and defends their position, whether consciously or by implication. Literature that opposes them is called propaganda. And so it is that you have probably never heard of myMammonart.

I had now studied our culture in five muckraking books:The Profits of Religion,The Brass Check,The Goose-Step,The Goslings,Mammonart. After that, I took up American literature, mostly of my own time. I had known many of the writers, and some liked me and some didn’t, according to which side they were on. I had published the five earlier books myself—in both cloth and paper; but there were not so many libel suits in the field of literature, so now I found a publisher. From that time on for many years my arrangement was that the publisher had his edition and I had mine, always at the same price. I had a card file of some thirty thousand customers.

I called the new bookMoney Writes!Its thesis was that authors have to eat; in order to get food they have to have money, and for that to happen the publisher has to get more money. So, in acommercial world it is money that decides what is to be written. My discussion of this somewhat obvious truth gave offense to many persons.

When I was working on a book, my secretary had orders never to disturb me. But one day she did disturb me by bringing in a visiting card attached to a hundred-dollar bill. (She judged I would consider that a fair price for an interruption.) I looked at the card and saw the name, King C. Gillette, familiar to all men who use a safety razor. Some years earlier I had noted on the shelves of the Pasadena Public Library two large tomes entitledWorld CorporationandSocial Redemption. I had taken them down and examined them with curiosity; they were written by a man who apparently had never read a socialist book but had thought it all out for himself. (I could guess that I might be the only person who had ever taken those tomes from the library shelf.)

Gillette, of course, was pleased to hear that I knew his books. He was a large gentleman with white hair and mustache and rosy cheeks; extremely kind, and touchingly absorbed in the hobby of abolishing poverty and war. But I discovered that he had a horror of the very wordsocialism. To him that meant class struggle and hatred, whereas he insisted that his solution could all be brought about by gentle persuasion and calm economic reasoning. He would take the time to explain this to anyone on the slightest occasion. I discovered that the joy of his life was to get someone to listen while in his gentle pleading voice he told about his two-tome utopia.

He had come to me for a definite purpose. He knew that I had an audience, and he wanted me to convert that audience to his program. He had a manuscript, and he wanted me to take it and revise it—of course, not changing any of his ideas. For this service he was prepared to pay me five hundred dollars a month; and a little later when he met my wife he raised his offer. He said, “Mrs. Sinclair, if you will get him to do this for me you will never have to think about money again as long as you live.” That had a good sound to Craig, and she said I would do it.

She told me so, and of course I had to do what she said. Little by little I discovered what it meant: Mr. Gillette was coming for two mornings every week to tell me his ideas—the same ideas over and over again. He was a bit childish about it. He didn’t remember what he had said a week or two previously and said it again, most seriously, impressively, and kindly. It became an endurance test. How often could I listen to the same ideas and pretend that they were new and wonderful? The time came when I could stand no more, not if he had turned over to me all the royalties from Gillette razors and blades. I had to tell him that I had done everything I could do for him.

I had helped him to get his manuscript into shape, but, alas, he had scribbled all over it and interlined it. I had it recopied, and with his permission submitted it to Horace Liveright, my publisher at that time. Horace couldn’t very well refuse it because Gillette offered to put up twenty-five thousand dollars for advertising. The book was published, and in spite of all the effort it fell flat.

But the dear old gentleman never gave up. He would come to see us now and then and invite us to his home. He had one down at Balboa Beach, and another far up in the San Fernando Valley. When Sergei Eisenstein came, we took him and a party up to meet Gillette, but the family were away. We had a picnic under one of the shade trees on the estate and carefully gathered up all the debris.

Writing books involves hard labor of both brain and typewriter. I have mentioned more than once the subject of tennis—the device by which I was able to get the blood out of my brain and into my digestive apparatus. All through those years I used to say that I was never more than twenty-four hours ahead of a headache. I had read somewhere in history that it was the law in the armies of King Cyrus that every soldier had to sweat every day. I found that I could get along with sweating three times a week. (Out of curiosity I once weighed before and after a hard tennis match in Pasadena’s summer weather, and discovered that I had parted with four and a half pounds of water.)

Tennis is a leisure-class recreation, and on the courts I met some of the prominent young men of my City of Millionaires. I was amused to note that their attitude toward me on the court was cordial and sometimes even gay, but we did not meet elsewhere. Sometimes their wives would drive them to the court and call for them when the game was over; but never once was I invited to meet one of those wives. I quietly mounted my bicycle and pedaled a couple of miles, slightly uphill, to my home. On Sunday morning I had a regular date with three men: one of the town’s leading bankers, one of the town’s leading real-estate men, and another whose high occupation I have forgotten. We played at the ultrafashionable Valley Hunt Club, but never once was I invited to enter the doors of that club. When the game was over, I mounted my bicycle and pedaled away.

One of these cases is especially amusing, and I tell it even though it leads me ahead of my story. I had a weekly tennis date with a young man of a family that owned a great business in Los Angeles. The young man, who lived in Pasadena, called me “the human rabbit,” because I scurried across the court and got shots that he thought he had put away. Every time we played, his wife would be waiting in her car, and I dutifully kept my distance.

After several years I learned from the newspapers that he had divorced his wife. Then Craig read an advertisement that all the furniture of an elegant home was being offered for sale. She wanted a large rug for the living room, so I drove her to the place and waited outside while she went in. It proved to be a long wait, but I always carry something to read so I didn’t mind. Craig bought a rug, and told me that the lady who was doing the selling was the ex-wife of my tennis friend! She was a chatty lady and had told her varied social adventures, including this:

“I almost caught Neil Vanderbilt. He drove up to a boulevard stop right alongside me, and I caught his eye. If that red light had lasted fifteen seconds longer, I’d have nailed him!”

(I myself with Craig’s help had already “nailed” Neil, and I shall have a bit to tell about him later on. He is the possessor of an enchanted name, which has brought him much trouble. I know only one man equally unfortunate—Prince Hopkins. When he traveled in Europe, the bellboys hit their foreheads on the ground; he changed his name to Pryns to avoid the sight.)

In some trading deal Craig had come into possession of two lots on Signal Hill, near Long Beach; and now in the papers she read the electrifying news that oil had been discovered under that wide hill. I drove her down there to find out about it, and she learned that lot owners in the different blocks were organizing, since obviously there could be no drilling on a tiny bit of land. I must have taken Craig a dozen times—a distance of twenty miles or so—and I sat for that many evenings listening to the arguments. I hadn’t a word to say of course; the lots belonged to Craig, and she was the business end of the family.

It was human nature in the raw, and this was the first time I had seen it completely naked. There were big lots, and there were little lots; there were corner lots—these had higher value for residences, but did they have more oil under them? Cliques were formed, and tempers blazed—they never quite came to blows, but almost. And there sat a novelist, watching, listening, and storing away material for what he knew was going to be a great long novel. He listened to the lawyers and to the oilmen who came to make offers; they told their troubles. They wanted the lease as cheaply as possible, and they had no idea they were going to be in a novel with the titleOil!—including the exclamation point. The book was going to be taken by a book club, translated into twenty-seven languages, and read all over the world—but all they wanted was to get that lease more cheaply.

One of them offered in exchange a goat ranch somewhere down to the south, and so we drove there; I looked at the hills, and the goats, and the people who raised them. A crude country fellow, he too was going to be translated into twenty-seven languages, of which he had never even heard the names.

I told Craig what I was doing, of course; and it pleased her because it would keep me out of mischief for a year. She got tired of the oil game herself and sold her lots for ten thousand dollars each.

Into the novel I put not merely the oil business but Hollywood, where the wealthy playboys go; also the labor struggle, which is all over America. It made a long novel, 527 closelyprinted pages; when it was published, a kind Providence inspired the chief of police of Boston to say that it was indecent, and to bar it from the city. After that, of course, the publishers couldn’t get the books printed fast enough; and they besieged me to go to Boston and make a fight. “Would you trade on the indecency of your book?” demanded Craig; and I answered that I wished to trade on its decency. So she let me go.

In Grand Central Station when I took the train for Boston, I learned that the bookstand there couldn’t keep a supply of the books; everyone bound for Boston took copies for his friends. When I reached the city, I interviewed the chief of police, an elderly Catholic gentleman who told me which passages he objected to. I had those passages blacked out in some copies and sold them on the street—the fig-leaf edition, a rare collector’s item now. What shocked the Catholic gentleman most was the passage in which an older sister mentions the subject of birth control to a younger brother. I recall the soft voice of the old chief, pleading: “Now surely, Mr. Sinclair, nobody should write a thing like that.” I told him I earnestly wished that someone had done me that favor when I was young. I believed in birth control, and practiced it, and I am sure that the salvation of the human race will depend on it—and soon.

During my stay in Boston I paid a visit to Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who had been in prison at that time for about six years, and whom I had visited not long after his arrest. He was one of the wisest and kindest persons I ever knew, and I thought him as incapable of murder as I was. After he and Nicola Sacco had been executed, I returned to Boston and gathered material for a two-volume novel dealing with their case.

I had developed what the doctor called a plantar wart under one heel, so it was hard for me to walk; but I got myself into a Pullman car, and when I reached Boston I hobbled around the streets with a crutch, talking with everyone who had been close to the case.

I had a story half formed in my mind. Among Mrs. Gartz’s rich friends I had met an elderly lady, socially prominent in Boston; Mrs. Burton was her name, and she enjoyed telling me odd stories about the tight little group of self-determined aristocrats who ruled the social life of the proud old city. Judge Alvan T. Fuller and President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard belonged to that group—and Bartolomeo Vanzetti didn’t. Mrs. Burton had come to California, seeking a new life, and I delighted her by saying that she would be my heroine—“the runaway grandmother,” I would call her.

For my story I needed to know not merely the Italian laborers, who were easy to meet, but the aristocrats, who were difficult. Soon after my arrival, still on a crutch, I read that the proprietor of a great Boston industry had died and was to be buried from his home. It was a perfect setup: a great mill in a valley, the cottages of the workers all about it, and the mansion of the owner on the height above. I went to that mansion and followed the little river of guests into the double parlor for the funeral service. When one of the sons of the family came up to me, I told him I had great respect for his father, and he said I was welcome. So I watched the scene of what I knew would be my opening chapter.

On my way back on a streetcar I was recognized by a reporter from theEvening Transcript, the paper then read by everybody who was anybody in and about Boston. He had come to write up the funeral, and he included me. I shall never forget the horror on the face of a proper Boston couple when I told them of my attendance at that funeral. Maybe it will shock the readers of this book. I can only say that if you are a novelist you think about “copy” and not about anybody’s feelings, even your own. If I were talking to you about that scene, I wouldn’t say, “Was it a proper thing to do?” I would say, “Did I get that scene correct?” When I went back to the little beach cottage, I wrote a two-volume novel in which all the scenes were correct; and the novel will outlive me.

On the way home I stopped at Denver for a conference with Fred Moore, who had been the original attorney for Sacco and Vanzetti, and had been turned away when one of the Boston aristocracy, W. G. Thompson, consented to take over the appeals. Fred was bitter about it, of course, and it might be that this had influenced his opinion. He told me he thought there wasa possibility that Sacco was involved in the payroll holdup. He thought there was less chance in the case of Vanzetti. There were anarchists who called themselves “direct actionists,” and Fred knew of things they had done. I pointed out to him that if Sacco had been guilty and Vanzetti innocent it meant that Vanzetti had given his life to save the life of some comrade.

Of course, I did not know and could only guess. I wrote the novel that way, portraying Vanzetti as I had known him and as his friends had known him. Some of the things I told displeased the fanatical believers; but having portrayed the aristocrats as they were, I had to do the same thing for the anarchists. The novel,Boston, ran serially inThe Bookmanand was published in two handsome volumes that went all over the world.

Just recently I had the honor of a visit from Michael Musmanno, who as a young lawyer came late into the Sacco-Vanzetti case and gave his heart as well as his time and labor to an effort to save the lives of those two men. Being Italian himself, he felt that he knew them, and he became firmly assured of their innocence. Now he has become a much-respected justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania; but he still feels as he did, and poured out his soul as if he were addressing the jury of a generation ago. The bitter old Boston judge and the grim governor and the cold-hearted president of Harvard all came to life, and I found myself sitting again in the warden’s reception room at Charlestown prison, in converse with the wise and gentle working-class philosopher named Bartolomeo Vanzetti. I had sent him several of my books, and he had been permitted to have them; I wish that I could have had a phonograph to take down his groping but sensitive words.

We had made too many friends and incurred too many obligations in Pasadena; so we found a cottage down on the ocean front at Alamitos Bay, Long Beach, and moved there. During both of my trips to Boston, Craig stayed alone in the little beach cottage and never minded it. Somehow she felt safe, and the waves on the other side of the boardwalk lulled her to sleep. She had become fascinated with the problem of her own mind, and studied it with the help of scores of books that I had got for her. I still have more than a hundred volumes on psychology and philosophy and psychic research that she read and marked—Bergson, William James, William McDougall, Charcot, Janet—a long list of the best. She had had psychic experiences herself in her girlhood and was tormented with the desire to understand these hidden forces of the mind. All the time that I was writingOil!andBoston, I was also helping her to find out what her gift actually was—and to guess what it meant. The result was the book calledMental Radio.

The procedure we adopted was the simplest possible: I would make half a dozen drawings on slips of paper and put each inside an envelope. Then I would bring them to Craig, who was lying on her couch. She would lay one of them over her solar plexus—having read somewhere that this might be the center of the unknown forces. We didn’t know whether that was so or not; but the solar plexus was as good as any other place. I would sit quietlyand keep watch so as to be able to say that she did not cheat—although, of course, I knew that she had never cheated in her life. She had only one obsession—she wanted to know for certain if these forces werereal.

She would decide that something that had come into her mind wasthereality, and she would take pencil and pad and make a drawing. Then we would open the envelope and compare the two. The results were amazing to us both.

I had been reading about telepathy and clairvoyance since my youth. At Columbia I had studied with James Hyslop, who had been a patient psychic researcher; then there was the Unitarian minister who had performed my first marriage—Minot J. Savage—who told me he had seen and talked with a ghost who said that he had just been drowned off the coast of Britain. The results in Craig’s case settled the matter for us, and settles it for anyone who is unwilling to believe that we are a pair of imbeciles as well as cheats. There is no other alternative, for we took every possible precaution against any blunder, and there is no way to account for what happened except to say that a drawing completely invisible to the eyes can make an impression on the mind by some other means.

It was not merely from my drawings that Craig got these impressions. She got them from the mind of a professional medium, whom she employed to experiment with her. I have given the details inMental Radio. I printed several thousand copies of the book, and the experiments it describes have stayed unexplained now for thirty years. It is worth noting also thatMental Radiohas just been reissued—this time by a publisher of scientific books exclusively. This is significant.

Professor William McDougall, who had been head of the department of psychology first at Oxford and then at Harvard, wrote a preface to the book. When he came to see us at the little beach cottage, he told us that he had just accepted a position as head of the department of psychology at Duke University; he had a fund at his disposal and proposed to establish a department of parapsychology to investigate these problems. He said he had taken the liberty of bringing several cards in his pocket, and he would like to be able to say that Craig had demonstrated her power to him.

Craig, always a high-strung person, hated to be submitted to tests because they made her nervous; but her respect for McDougall was great, and she said she would do her best. She sat quietly and concentrated. Then she said that she had an impression of a building with stone walls and narrow windows, and the walls were covered with something that looked like green leaves. McDougall took from an inside pocket a postcard of a building at Oxford University covered with ivy. There were two or three other successes that I have forgotten. The outcome was that McDougall said he was satisfied, and would go to Duke and set up the new department. He did so, with results that all the world knows.

I was interested to observe the conventional thinker’s attitude toward a set of ideas that he does not wish to accept.Mental Radiocontained 210 examples of successes in telepathy—partial successes and complete successes. To the average orthodox scientist, the idea was inconceivable, and it just wasn’t possible to tell him anything that he knew in advance couldn’t have happened. On the other hand, the lovely personality of Mary Craig is shown all through the book, and I cannot recall that any scientist ever accused her of cheating. He would go out of his way to think of something thatmighthave happened, and then he would assume that ithadhappened; itmusthave happened, and that settled the matter. He would entirely overlook the fact that I had mentioned that same possibility and had stated explicitly that ithadn’thappened; that we had made it absolutely impossible for itto havehappened.

I won’t be unkind enough to name any scientist. One suggested solemnly that it might have been possible for Mary Craig to have gotten an idea of the drawing by seeing the movements of my hand at a distance. But in the book I plainly stated that I never made the drawing without going into another room and closing the door. That kind of oversight has been committed again and again by the critics.

While I am on this subject I will venture to slip ahead for several years and tell of one more experiment. Arthur Ford, the medium, was paying a visit to Los Angeles, and I asked him to come out to our home and see if his powers had waned. (He hadnever refused an invitation from us—and he had never let us pay him a dollar.) He said he would come, and Craig was so determined to make a real test that she wouldn’t even let me invite our friends by telephone. Our line might be tapped! She wrote a letter to Theodore Dreiser, and one to Rob Wagner, editor ofScript, who was a skeptic but wanted to be shown.

When evening came, my orders were to wait outside for Arthur and take him around behind the house so that he might not see who came in. This I faithfully did; so there were Dreiser and his wife, and Rob Wagner and his wife, and Craig’s sister, Dolly, and her husband. They were seated in a semidark room; and when I brought Arthur in, he went straight to the armchair provided, leaned back in it with his eyes toward the ceiling, and covered his eyes with a silk handkerchief, which is his practice.

Presently came the voice that Ford calls Fletcher. “Fletcher” speaks quietly and without a trace of emotion. He said there was a spirit present who had been killed in a strange accident. He had been crossing a street when a team of runaway horses came galloping, and the center pole had struck him in the chest. And then there was a spirit victim of another strange accident. This man had been in a warship when one of the guns had somehow backfired and killed him. And then there was a newspaperman and quite a long conversation about various matters that I have forgotten. I told the full details in an article for thePsychic Observerbut do not have a copy at hand.

At that point in the séance there came a tap on the door, and Mrs. Gartz came in with one of her nephews. She had known nothing about the séance; being highly antagonistic, she had not been invited. Fletcher said, “There is a strong Catholic influence here, but there will be a divorce.”

That ended the affair, possibly because of Mrs. Gartz’s hostile attitude. The lights were turned up, and the various guests spoke in turn. Bob Irwin, Craig’s brother-in-law, said that his young brother had been killed by exactly such a runaway team; Rob Wagner said that his brother had been killed in the Navy in a gun accident. Theodore Dreiser had been a journalist, but he denied that he had ever known such a man or heard of any such events as had come out in the séance. Mrs. Gartz’s nephewsaid that he was a Catholic, but there would surely not be any divorce.

So ended the evening; but the day after the next there came to Craig a letter from Helen Dreiser saying that she was embarrassed to tell us that Theodore had been drinking and had slept through the séance and not heard a word. When she had repeated to him the various statements, he admitted that he knew such a man and that the events mentioned had occurred.

The predicted divorce did not occur until a month or two later, when the wife of the Gartz nephew divorced him.

And now all the skeptics can put their wits to work and find out how Arthur Ford got all those facts about people he had never met, and about whom we had made such efforts at secrecy. I don’t like to be fooled any more than the next man, but I agree with Professor McDougall and Professor Rhine that it is the duty of science to investigate such events and find out what are the forces by which they are brought about.

Just by way of fun, I will add that Professor McDougall established his department of parapsychology, and Professor Rhine has carried it on; one of the things they have proved is that when Negroes shooting craps snap their fingers and cry “Come seven! Come eleven!” they really are influencing the dice. Rhine’s investigators have caused millions of dice to be thrown mechanically, and observers have willed certain numbers to come, and the numbers have come. The chances for the successes having happened accidentally are up in the billions. Most embarrassing—but it happens!

Much of the story of my life is a story of the books I wrote. I read a great many, too, and among those I found interesting was a history of ancient Rome—because of the resemblance between the political and economic circumstances of two thousand years ago and those I knew so well in my native land. So I wroteRoman Holiday, the story of a rich young American who amuses himself driving a racing automobile. He meets with an accident and wakes up in the days when he had been driving horses in a chariot race in the arena of ancient Rome. Everything is familiarto him, and he goes back and forth between the two ages of history, equally at home in both. This novel was a foreshadowing of my tragic drama,Cicero—although, rather oddly, this realization did not come to me until just recently, whenCicerowas produced.

My next book handled the problem of prohibition, of special interest to me ever since I had seen my father and two of my uncles die as alcoholics. The whole country was boiling with excitement over the struggle between the “wets” and the “drys,” so I put my youthful self into a long novel, with all the characters I had known and the battles I had fought against the saloon-keepers and the crooked politicians.The Wet ParadeI called it. It was made into a very good motion picture, with an illustrious cast that included Robert Young, Walter Huston, Myrna Loy, Lewis Stone, and Jimmie Durante as the comic prohibition agent.

Of course, the “wet paraders” I knew, headed by H. L. Mencken, had all kinds of fun with me. But many of my oldest and best friends have been caught in that parade, and I have had to watch them go down to early graves. Jack London was one of them. I have told of his appearance and his rousing speech at a mass meeting in New York City back in the days when we were launching the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. The next day I had lunch with him. The occasion was completely spoiled for me because Jack was drinking and I wasn’t, and he amused himself by teasing me with his exploits—the stories he afterward put into his book,John Barleycorn. Later, when I went to live in Pasadena, Jack urged me now and again to come up to Glen Ellen, his wonderful estate. I did not go because George Sterling told me that Jack’s drinking had become tragic. Jack took his own life at the age of forty.

And, alas, George Sterling followed his example. Shortly before George’s death, Mencken, who was in California, told me that he had seen George at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco and that he was in a terrible state after another of his drinking bouts. A day or two later George took poison—but Mencken learned nothing from that dreadful episode.

On one of my trips to New York I was asked to make a funeral speech over the body of a kind and generous publisher, Horace Liveright. I remember his weeping, black-clad mother and, sitting apart from her, the lovely young actress who had been living in his home in Hollywood when my wife and I went there to dinner, and who had taken drink for drink with him. I remember walking downtown with Theodore Dreiser after the funeral. We discussed the tragedy of drinking, and I knew the anguish that Theodore’s wife was suffering. But he learned nothing from the funeral or from my arguments.

As I write there comes the news of the death of Ernest Hemingway. He received an almost fatal wound in World War I, and this apparently centered all his mind upon the idea of death. It became an obsession with him—something not merely to write about but to inflict upon living creatures. His idea of recreation was to kill large wild animals in Africa, and half-tame bulls in Mexico, and small game in America, and great fish in the sea. He wrote about all these experiences with extraordinary vividness and became the most popular writer in America, and perhaps in the world. When he died, theSaturday Reviewgave thirty pages to his personality and his writings, almost two thirds of the reading matter in that issue. I read a good part of it, and found myself in agreement with just one paragraph, by a contributor:

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