U. S. NAVY ADMITS ROTTEN ARMORCarnegie Co.’s Profit, $700,000ADMIRAL MASON SAYS OREGON NOW CARRIES 400 TONSIndiana, Massachusetts, New York and Others Also Have Defective PlatesFACTS HIDDEN 15 YEARSRevelations in Upton Sinclair’s New Novel Are Fully Verified
U. S. NAVY ADMITS ROTTEN ARMORCarnegie Co.’s Profit, $700,000ADMIRAL MASON SAYS OREGON NOW CARRIES 400 TONSIndiana, Massachusetts, New York and Others Also Have Defective PlatesFACTS HIDDEN 15 YEARSRevelations in Upton Sinclair’s New Novel Are Fully Verified
U. S. NAVY ADMITS ROTTEN ARMOR
Carnegie Co.’s Profit, $700,000
ADMIRAL MASON SAYS OREGON NOW CARRIES 400 TONS
Indiana, Massachusetts, New York and Others Also Have Defective Plates
FACTS HIDDEN 15 YEARS
Revelations in Upton Sinclair’s New Novel Are Fully Verified
Washington, Sept. 5—Rear-Admiral W. P. Mason, Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, in an interview today admitted that the battleship Oregon, once the pride of the United States Navy, has carried since the day she was built 400 tons of defective armor plate.
In addition the naval authorities reluctantly told that the conning tower of the Oregon, which by expert testimony nearly fifteen years ago was shown to be full of blowholes, is still on this vessel, which may any day be called in defending the country against an enemy.
It is also known that the armor manufactured by the Carnegie Steel Company, Limited, up to the latter part of 1893, which Hilary A. Herbert, then Secretary of the Navy, recommended be stripped from the Indiana, New York, Massachusetts and several other smaller vessels has never been removed.
The investigation made by the “American” was prompted by the assertion in Upton Sinclair’s new book “The Money-changers,” that “there are ships in our navy covered with rotten armor plate that was sold to the Government for four or five times what it cost.”
Referring to the investigation in 1893–94, which resulted in the celebrated armor plate scandal, the author says: “Nothing much was ever done about it. The Government could not afford to let the real facts get out. But, of course, the insiders in the navy knew about it, and the memory will last as long as the ships last.”
This part of the book is a bitter attack on several well-known men who have been connected for years with the steel industry, andwhose identity it is easy to trace. It charges that at the time of the armor plate scandal they bought out the Democratic party and secured the support of a President of the United States.
And here is part of a second dispatch, which appeared in the “New York World” the following day. It is amusing to note how these two rivals, the “World” and the “American,” follow each other up!
Lake Placid, N. Y., Sept. 6—In an interview given by him today, after he had been informed by his publishers and a representative of the “World” of a report from Pittsburgh that William E. Corey, President of the U. S. Steel Corporation, is to proceed against him for libel, basing his action on charges contained in his new novel, Upton Sinclair, who is spending the summer at Lake Placid, defied the “Steel Crowd,” as he designated Mr. Corey and his associates, to do their worst.
Mr. Sinclair declared he would welcome legal action on the part of Mr. Corey, because it would give him an opportunity to place on record evidence which he declares is in his possession concerning alleged fraudulent acts of the steel men.
“I have not as many documents as I once had,” said Mr. Sinclair; “I have not been able to replace some that were burned at Helicon Hall; but I have more than Mr. Corey would care to see in print, I fancy.”
Mr. Sinclair said that among other documents in his possession before the destruction of Helicon Hall by fire, were affidavits and other papers pertaining to alleged fraudulent practices in connection with the manufacture of steel rails.
“I took the trouble,” said he “to go out to Pittsburgh. I spent a couple of weeks investigating. I had affidavits to prove that these practices prevailed in the case of steel rails, a year or two before E. H. Harriman gave out his statement as to the wretched quality of rails which the Steel Trust was selling his railroads. I can tell Mr. Harriman, too, that his own purchasing officials were not ignorant about it.”
All this, of course, had little to do with literature. But it had something to do with Journalism, had it not? It had to do with matters of vital importance to the American people—battleships that could not fight, and steel rails that cracked and caused train-wrecks. How came it that all our organs of “respectability” kept silence, and left these grave matters to the despised “yellow” press?
CHAPTER XVSHREDDED WHEAT BISCUIT
I had all but ruined my health by overwork, and I now went to California for a winter’s rest. I rested a couple of months, and then wrote three one act plays. Having received a couple of thousand dollars from “The Money-changers,” I decided to try out a plan which had haunted me for many years, that of establishing a Socialist theatrical enterprise. There were fifteen hundred Socialist locals throughout the United States, some of them large organizations. Would not they welcome a little travelling company, voicing the ideas which were barred from the commercial stage? I began to organize and rehearse such a company in San Francisco. And so came new adventures with the newspapers.
First, the famous Adventure of the Shredded Wheat Biscuit. It must be explained that I was trying queer ideas in diet; I have always been of an experimental temperament, and was willing to try anything in the hope of solving the health problem, which I have since realized is insoluble—there being no diet or system of any sort which will permit a man to overwork with impunity. In California I was living on raw food, and had written some articles about it in “Physical Culture.” When I had to eat in San Francisco hotels I could not get raw food, of course, but at least I wanted whole wheat bread, or failing that, Shredded Wheat Biscuit. All of which, needless to say, was highly amusing to hotel proprietors and newspaper reporters.
I was staying at the St. Francis, and I ordered a meal in the restaurant, from a menu which specified “One Shredded Wheat Biscuit with cream, 25c; Two Shredded Wheat Biscuit with cream, 40c.” I ordered One Shredded Wheat Biscuit, and after I had eaten it I wanted another, so I told the waiter to make it two. When I received the bill it showed fifty cents, and I pointed out to the waiter that this was an error, it should have been forty cents; I had had only one portion of cream. The waiter consulted and returned with the information that inasmuch as the order had beenplaced in the form of two orders, the bill was twenty-five cents each. I paid the bill without further comment, but going out into the lobby I reflected that it was rather preposterous to charge twenty-five cents for a Shredded Wheat Biscuit, when you could go around the corner to a grocery-store and buy a dozen in a box for ten or fifteen cents. My abnormal sense of equity vented itself in a brief note to the management, stating that I had been charged fifty cents for two Shredded Wheat Biscuit, when the price on the menu was forty cents, and I would appreciate having my extra ten cents returned to me. This note I handed to the clerk, and there my knowledge of the matter ends. I am not in position to say that the management of the Hotel St. Francis turned over my note to the “San Francisco Examiner.” I can only say that I did not mention the matter to anyone, and that all I did was to write the note, seal it in an envelope, and hand it to the clerk at the desk.
I understand, of course, that hotels have to have publicity. People are arriving in the city by thousands every day, and the problem of what hotels they go to depends upon what hotels they hear about. If a great soap-magnate or lard-king is visiting the St. Francis, the management makes haste to notify the reporters, and there is published a dignified interview with the soap-magnate or lard-king, giving his opinion of the market-prospects for soap or lard, and the need of a higher tariff on such commodities. If a notorious Socialist muck-raker is visiting the St. Francis, and it is discovered that he orders Waldorf salads and Shredded Wheat Biscuit and suchlike foods for monkeys and squirrels—why, then the management perceives an opportunity for publicity of a gay and cheerful nature. San Francisco, you understand, prides itself upon being a place of Bohemianism, of bonhomie; San Francisco had more saloons in proportion to its population than any other city in America, and more venereal disease than Paris—so I was told by a Stanford professor. San Francisco must have its little jokes.
Next morning there appeared in the “San Francisco Examiner” a “feature story” to the effect that Upton Sinclair had ordered two Shredded Wheat Biscuit in the dining-room of the Hotel St. Francis, and when rendered a bill for twenty-five cents had refused to pay it and had raised a disturbance in the dining-room. Immediately, of course, the great concretewall turned into a news-channel once again, and people in Vancouver and Buenos Aires, in Johannesburg and Shanghai and Auckland, who had last heard of Upton Sinclair as working as a steward on Howard Gould’s yacht, now heard of him as raising a disturbance over Shredded Wheat Biscuit in a hotel dining-room. “Upton Sinclair Rages,” runs the headline in the “Los Angeles Examiner.” An actress by the name of Rose Stahl was playing up in Seattle, and her publicity man must have seen an opportunity to “get in on the game.” In the afternoon paper there appeared a story to the effect that Rose Stahl had telegraphed me twenty-five cents with which to pay for my Shredded Wheat Biscuit. Rose Stahl did not actually send me the twenty-five cents; at any rate I never received it; she merely gave out the story that she was sending it, and the concrete wall remained a news-channel long enough to convey this report.
I stop and wonder: will my readers find it possible to believe these tales? So many, many things happening to one man! There is something suspicious about it—where there is so much smoke, surely there must have been at least one tiny spark of fire! Did I not really raise a disturbance, just the tiniest little bit of a disturbance—such as would have caused the people at the next table to desist from their conversation and look at me?
All that I can do is to remind the reader of the pledge I gave at the beginning of this book: I am telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Not only did I not raise a disturbance in the dining-room of the Hotel St. Francis, I never in my life raised a disturbance in a public dining-room, nor in any other public place so far as I can recollect. The one act that might be called a “disturbance” was that which I performed in front of the office of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., during the Colorado coal-strike; it consisted of walking up and down in absolute silence with a band of crepe around my arm. On several other occasions I have made Socialist speeches, and the newspapers have seen fit to write these up as if they were disturbances; but I have never in my life engaged in any sort of altercation or controversy in a public place. I am by instinct shy, and I don’t go into public at all, except I am carried by some conviction. As a little boy I got into one or two fights, and got a bloody nose each time, but since the age of eleven or twelve I havenever struck a human being, and can only remember threatening to do so on one occasion—in a public park, when I saw an old bootblack beating a very small boy. As for raising a disturbance with a waiter, I can only say that when a poor wage-slave in a leisure-class hotel brings me an improper bill, my impulse is to give him, not a scolding, but an I. W. W. tract. My anger is reserved for the management of the hotel which is robbing me, and I give vent to this anger in a polite letter, which causes the management to rob me still further. As Shakespeare says:
Who steals my purse steals trash;But he that filches from me my good Name,Robs me of that which not enriches him,And leaves me poor indeed.
Who steals my purse steals trash;But he that filches from me my good Name,Robs me of that which not enriches him,And leaves me poor indeed.
Who steals my purse steals trash;But he that filches from me my good Name,Robs me of that which not enriches him,And leaves me poor indeed.
Who steals my purse steals trash;
But he that filches from me my good Name,
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And leaves me poor indeed.
My wife reads this story, and laughs; she says the world will find me comical, defending myself so very solemnly against a comical charge. Well, I am not without a sense of humor; I look back in retrospect, and have not a little fun over my “monkey diet” days. But I am serious in this book, and if you will bear with me to the end, you will see why; you will see this same predatory Journalism, which made a “monkey” out of me, engaged in blasting the best hopes of mankind, and perpetuating slavery and torment for hundreds of millions of people.
CHAPTER XVIAN INTERVIEW ON MARRIAGE
Two or three days after the Shredded Wheat episode, there called on me a pleasant lady who introduced herself as a friend of an old friend of mine. She wanted to ask me some questions; and as I was just going in to lunch and had an engagement immediately afterwards, I asked this lady to lunch with me. It appeared that a man and woman in the city had announced the completion of a five or ten years’ “trial marriage.” Would I say what I thought about this couple, and about “trial marriages” in general? I have always been willing to say what I thought about any subject, so I explained that while I was not an advocate of “trial marriages,” it was apparent that this couple were sincere, and one must respect people who stood by their convictions in the face of prejudice and ridicule.
I went on to talk to this lady on the subject of modern marriages. I cannot, of course, state word for word what I said, but I know my views, which have not changed in any way, so I can practically duplicate the interview.
In any competitive society, woman is necessarily condemned to a position of inferiority by the burdens of maternity; so, either she has to suppress her love-nature and her desire for children, or she must find some man who will take care of her. In a society whose standards are pecuniary, that is to say, whose members are esteemed in proportion to the amount of their worldly possessions, the average woman is forced into a mercenary attitude toward love and marriage. In weighing the various men who offer themselves, she will generally have to balance money against love; and the more corrupt the society becomes—that is to say, the greater the economic inequality—the more mercenary will become the attitude of women, the more they will weigh money in the balance, and the less they will weigh love. This is particularly true of the older women, who know the world and the ways of the world, and who seek to control the marriages made by their young.
In the course of this abstract discourse I gave some instances.I told of a couple of mothers I had watched, marrying off their daughters to what they called “eligible” men—that is to say, men who could support the daughters in luxury. I said: “Those girls were practically sold.” I told of a young girl being married to a hard and dull old business man. I told of another young girl being married to a rich man who had syphilis. I told of another young girl, who happened to be intimately known to myself and my wife, who had been in the plight of a school-teacher—that is to say, facing a life-time of drudgery, and the ultimate breakdown of her health—and who had married a middle-aged corrupt politician. We had watched the progress of this marriage. We knew that the husband was unfaithful to his wife, and we knew that the wife knew it, and we knew that for the sake of a home and fashionable clothes she was parting with the finer qualities of her nature. Said I: “We have seen this woman’s character deteriorating stage by stage; and when we see things like that, it almost makes us feel ashamed of being married.”
Now, of course, this was a foolish remark; but it was no worse than foolish, was it? It wasn’t precisely criminal. But see what was done with it!
I parted from the lady who had been my guest at lunch, and next morning, January 30, 1909, a member of my little theatrical company called me up in excitement and distress of mind, to ask had I seen that morning’s “Examiner.” I obtained a copy, and on the front page I saw a picture of myself and a picture of my wife—that stolen picture about which I have previously told. The story had a scare headline reading:
UPTON SINCLAIR SORRY HE WED. SAYS CEREMONY IS FARCE
UPTON SINCLAIR SORRY HE WED. SAYS CEREMONY IS FARCE
UPTON SINCLAIR SORRY HE WED. SAYS CEREMONY IS FARCE
Underneath the pictures was the caption:
Upton Sinclair and the wife he declared yesterday he is sorry that he married.
I will quote a few paragraphs from the article; you will appreciate the jolly tone of it:
Upton Sinclair says he’s sorry he’s married.
He said it right out in a calm, matter-of-fact tone of voice, and the waiter almost dropped the butter-plate, well trained as the particularwaiter who happened to be leaning over the back of Mr. Sinclair’s chair with this particular butter-plate happened to be.
As Mr. Sinclair talked he threw a handful of California raisins into his dish of Waldorf salad and watched with evident pleasure the contrast of the dull purple of the raisins with the pale silver of the celery and the gold of the aspic mayonnaise.
“Why am I so prejudiced against marriage? Why shouldn’t I be prejudiced against it? You might as well ask me why I am so prejudiced against slavery—or against thievery—or if it comes to that against murder either. Marriage in this day is nothing but legalized—slavery; that’s the most polite word to call it, I fancy. The average married woman is bought and sold just exactly as much as any horse or any dog is bought. Marriage—ough! It really isn’t a subject to be discussed at the table!”
Needless to say, here was another occasion where the concrete wall became a news-channel. This story was telegraphed to all the Hearst newspapers, and published with the same photographs in New York, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. The substance of it was telegraphed abroad and laid before the readers of my books, not merely in England and France and Germany and Norway and Sweden, but in South Africa and Australia, in Yokohama and Hong Kong and Bombay. Please do not think that I am just giving you a geography lesson; I made a memorandum at the time concerning this particular story, which hurt me more than anything that had ever happened to me.
It chanced that my three one-act plays were to have their opening performance in San Francisco that evening. So when I was called on the stage to make a speech, I spread out a copy of the “Examiner” and told what had happened. Next morning the “Examiner” took up the cudgels, and published an article by “Annie Laurie,” the interviewing lady, upbraiding me for “playing the cry-baby” and refusing to stand by the words that I had spoken. Thinking the matter over, I realized that quite possibly “Annie Laurie” was partly sincere; she may have thought that the interview she wrote represented me! She was so vulgar that she saw no difference between the phrases I had used and the twist she had given to them.
This misquotation by ignorant and vulgar reporters happens not merely to muck-rakers and Socialist agitators; it happens to the most respectable persons. For example, here is Professor J. Laurence Laughlin, of Chicago University; he hides himself in the shade of his classic elms, and does his best to preserve his dignity, but in vain. In an address to agraduating class he urged the class “to seek a sense of form—in dress, manners, speech and intellectual habits. In antithesis it was pointed out that we had lived too long in a kingdom of slouch.” The New York papers got it by telegraph in this fashion:
The wiggling, swaying movements of American women on the streets and the stage have made them the ridicule of all Europe. They have a glide and a wiggle that makes them both undignified and ungraceful.
Whereupon the horrified professor writes to the “New York Nation”:
Of course, I never said any such thing, but papers in all parts of the country could not know that the report was stupid fiction, and that the quotation marks were absolutely false. Yet in this form the above vulgar paragraphs have gone the length and breath of the country as my utterances.
To understand such incidents you must know the economics of reporting. The person who misquoted Professor Laughlin was probably a student, scratching for his next week’s board-bill, and knowing that he would get two or three dollars for a startling story, and nothing at all for a true story—it would be judged “dull,” and would be “ditched.” In my own case, the person to blame was a “star writer”; she was working on a fancy salary, earned by her ability to cook up sensations, to keep her name and her picture on the front page. If this “star” had gone back to her city editor and said, “Upton Sinclair is a good fellow; he gave me an interesting talk about the corruption of modern marriages,” the editor would have scented some preachment and said, “Well, give him two sticks.” But instead she came into the office exclaiming, “Gee, I’ve got a hot one! That fool muck-raker tore up his marriage certificate before my eyes! He says that married women are sold like horses and he’s sorry he’s married to his wife!” So the city editor exclaimed, “Holy Smoke!”—seeing a story he could telegraph to the main offices in New York and Chicago, thus attracting to himself the attention of the heads of the Hearst machine.
For you must understand that while the city editor of the “San Francisco Examiner” will be getting three or four thousand dollars a year, above him are big positions of responsibility and power—Arthur Brisbane, getting ninety ora hundred thousand, Ihmsen, Carvalho, von Hamm and the rest, getting fifteen or twenty thousand. If you are to be lifted into those higher regions, you must show one thing and one thing only; it is called “a nose for news,” and it means a nose for the millions of pennies which come pouring into the Hearst coffers every day. From top to bottom every human being in the vast Hearst machine, man, woman and office-boy, has every nerve and sinew stretched to the task of bringing in that flood of pennies; each is fighting for a tiny bit of prestige, a tiny addition to his personal share of the flood. And always, of course, from top to bottom the thing to be considered is the million-headed public—what will tickle its fancies, what particular words printed in large red and black letters will cause it to pay out each day the greatest possible number of pennies.
In conflict with such motives, considerations of honor, truth and justice count for absolutely nothing. The men and women who turn out the Hearst newspapers were willing, not merely to destroy my reputation, they have been willing again and again to drive perfectly innocent men and women to ruin and suicide, in order that the copper flood may continue to pour in. They have been willing by deliberate and shameful lies, made out of whole cloth, to stir nations to enmity and drive them to murderous war. Mr. Hearst’s newspaper machine telegraphed that vile misrepresentation of me all the way round the world; it telegraphed my repudiation of it nowhere, and I was helpless in the matter. Millions of people were caused to think of me as a vulgar and fatuous person—and some of them were permitted to denounce me in Mr. Hearst’s own papers! The following contribution by the Rev. Charles H. Parkhurst, a sensational clergyman of New York, was featured in the “New York Evening Journal” with large headlines and a portrait of the reverend physiognomy:
Upton Sinclair seems to be a person so profusely developed on the animal side that marriage is not able to be conceived of by him as being other than a mere matter of commerce between two parties of opposite sexes, and sex simply a principle that starts and stops at the level of the physical without ever mounting up into the region of intellect and spirit.
A pig will contemplate even a garden of flowers with a pig’s eye, and instead of arranging those flowers into a bouquet will bore into them with his snout.
Mr. Sinclair’s doctrine is that of free love, and matrimony a physical luxury and an evanescent convenience.
This comes dangerously near to companioning him with the cattle and makes the marriage relation an elegant reproduction of the nuptials of the pasture.
Also I quote a few scattered sentences from a long editorial in the “Commercial-Appeal” of Memphis, Tennessee, an extremely conservative family newspaper, widely-read throughout the South:
A few years ago a young man by the name of Upton Sinclair wrote a novel about Packingtown. We do not recall the name of the book; but it should have been entitled “The Slaughterhouse.” It was just about the most nauseating novel that has ever been written by an American. It was a compound of blood and filth and slaughter, commingled with vice and shame. It was the kind of a book to be handled with a pair of tongs.... But recently Mr. Sinclair has aired his views upon matrimony, and what he has to say is simply shocking to decency.... It is hard for any decent person to understand such an attitude. If there is any one thing that distinguishes man from cats and dogs and other animals it is matrimony.... If Upton Sinclair’s offensive philosophy should be embraced, it would mean the absolute destruction of family life.... The Sinclair philosophy is the philosophy of lust and animalism and it could only emanate from a diseased and perverted mind.
I have quoted the above because there is a “human interest” story connected with it, which will perhaps bring home to you the harm which dishonest journalism does. For something like thirty years the “Memphis Commercial-Appeal” has been read by the honorable and high-minded old Southern gentleman who is now my father-in-law. Like all good Americans, this gentleman believes what he reads in his morning paper; like most busy Americans, he gets the greater part of his ideas about the world outside from his morning paper. He read this editorial, and got a certain impression of Upton Sinclair; and so you may imagine his feelings when, two or three years later, he learned that his favorite daughter intended to marry the possessor of this “diseased and perverted mind.” He took the beautiful oil painting of his favorite daughter which hangs in his drawing-room, and turned it to the wall. And that may bring a smile to you, but it brought no smile to the parties concerned; for in the South, you must understand, it is the custom for daughters to be devotedly attached to their fathers, and also to be devotedlyobedient to their fathers. If you had seen the tears I saw, you would know that this old gentleman’s daughter was not an exception to the rule.
And since we have started the subject, perhaps I might complete the “human interest” story by stating that after all the tears had been shed and the marriage was a couple of years in the past, I went down to visit this old Southern gentleman. It was a queer introduction; because the old gentleman was horribly embarrassed, and I, being impersonal and used to being called bad names, had no idea of it. After we had chatted for an hour or two I retired, and the daughter said: “Well, Papa, what do you think of him?”
The old gentleman is quaintly shy and reticent, and had probably never made an apology in his life before. He did it all in one sentence: “I see I overspoke myself.”
CHAPTER XVII“GAMING” ON THE SABBATH
I moved myself and family to the little single-tax colony at Arden, Delaware, and spent a winter living in tents. The newspapers of Philadelphia and Wilmington used Arden as the newspapers of New York had used Helicon Hall—for purposes of comic relief. For the most part it was not especially harmful publicity; it had to do with pageants and mediaeval costumes and tennis tournaments and singing festivals. But always there was ridicule, even though mild; and this was not a just light in which to place a group of people who had a serious and useful message to convey. I noticed that in their Arden stories the newspapers carefully refrained from giving any hint of what the single tax meant, or of why single taxers went to live in a colony. What got publicity was the fact that one of the Arden boys built himself a screened sleeping-place up in the branches of a big tree. “Arden Residents Roost in Tree-Tops”! ran the headlines. I wasn’t roosting in tree-tops myself, but the newspapers wanted pictures for this full-page story, and my picture happened to be on hand, so in it went.
I was writing a book, and trying to keep well, and doing my honest best to keep out of the “limelight”; but the fates were in a mood of special waggery, it appeared, and came and dragged me out of my hiding-place.
Close upon the edge of Arden there dwelt an Anarchist philosopher, a shoemaker hermit, whose greatest pleasure in life was to rise in public meetings and in the presence of young girls explain his ideas on the physiology of sex. The little Economic Club of Arden invited him to shut up, and when he claimed the privileges of “free speech,” the club excluded him from its meetings, and when he persisted in coming, had him arrested. It happened that the members of this Economic Club were also members of the baseball team, and they played a game on Sunday morning; so the Anarchist shoemaker repaired to Wilmington and swore out warrants, on the ground of their having violated an ancientstatute, dating back to 1793, forbidding “gaming” on the Sabbath. It happened that I did not belong to the Economic Club, and had had nothing to do with the trouble; but I had played tennis that Sabbath morning, so the Anarchist shoemaker included me in his warrants. He told me afterwards that he knew I would add publicity and “spice” to the adventure.
So behold us, eleven young men summoned to the office of a Wilmington Justice of the Peace one evening, and finding the street packed solid for a block, and people even climbing up telegraph poles and lamp-posts to look in at the window and watch the proceedings. I am accused of seeking notoriety, but on this occasion at least I may be acquitted of the charge. A constable had appeared at my home and interrupted my literary labors, with a notice to appear in this public spectacle, under penalty of dire displeasure of the law!
The members of the Arden Athletic Association appointed me their spokesman, and for an hour or two I labored to persuade the local magistrate that “gaming” meant gambling and not playing tennis and baseball. But the magistrate insisted that there was another statute against gambling, and he had no option but to find us guilty, and to fine us the sum of four dollars and costs, which amounted to a total of one hundred and thirty-two dollars. A large part of this would go to the magistrate and the constable, and we suspected that this was the basis of his decision; therefore we declined to pay our fines, and accepted the alternative of a jail-sentence. The limit under the law was twenty-four hours. We received eighteen, it being mercifully provided that our sentences should begin forthwith—at nine o’clock in the evening. We invited the constable to an ice-cream parlor, and served part of our sentence there, and another part of it taking a trolley-ride to the Newcastle County Workhouse. We sang songs on the way, and the motorman remarked that we were the happiest bunch of convicts he had ever taken to the institution.
This is a book on Journalism, and not on prison-reform, so I will be brief. We spent the night in cells which were swarming with vermin and had filthy, stinking toilets; we were served food which was unfit for animals, and we spent seven or eight hours working on a rock-pile under the chargeof men, some of whom were brutal and dishonest. This was the state prison of Delaware, as well as the county workhouse, and it held three or four hundred men, white and black, some twenty of them serving life-sentences, working in a clothing-factory under a sweatshop contractor. The prison had been recently built, and was advertised as a model one, yet there was no exercise-court or spot where men serving life-sentences could get a glimpse of the sunlight or a breath of fresh air!
When we came out from the jail we were met by twenty-two newspaper reporters and three camera-men, and everything we had to say took the front page, top of column. Incidentally, I got a curious revelation. For years I had written poetry, and had never been able to get it published; but now I found that by the simple device of writing it in jail, I could get it on the front page of every newspaper in Philadelphia and New York! The poem was “The Menagerie,” which you may find in “The Cry for Justice,” if you are interested. I had lain on the floor of my cell all night, listening to the sounds which echoed through the long steel corridors. I quote two lines:
And then in sudden stillness mark the sound—Some beast that rasps his vermin-haunted hide.
And then in sudden stillness mark the sound—Some beast that rasps his vermin-haunted hide.
And then in sudden stillness mark the sound—Some beast that rasps his vermin-haunted hide.
And then in sudden stillness mark the sound—
Some beast that rasps his vermin-haunted hide.
When my cell-mate, Berkeley Tobey, read those lines, he remarked: “That’s me!” To which I answered: “Tobey, that’s you!”
What we told about conditions in that jail made an uproar in Delaware. There was still more uproar because the Anarchist shoemaker was threatening to have us arrested every Sunday, if the Economic Club continued to exclude him from its meetings; and we made investigation and discovered that members of the Wilmington Country Club, including the Attorney General of the State and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, were accustomed to play golf on Sunday. We served notice that we would employ detectives and have them all arrested and sent to the Newcastle County Workhouse every Monday, so that they might discover what it meant to be confined in a place with no exercise-court and no chance for a glimpse of sunlight or breath of fresh air. The magistrates of Wilmington held a private conference and decided that they would issue no more warrants upon the charge of“gaming on the Sabbath.” Also the prison commissioners of Newcastle County held a meeting and decided that they had been intending all along to add an exercise-court to the prison.
Here was a case where I got publicity from the newspapers; yet the reader will note, I do not show much gratitude. This story took the front page, not because the newspapers cared anything about conditions in the Newcastle County Workhouse, but solely because the story was funny. Van Valkenburg, publisher of the “Philadelphia North American,” told a friend of mine that it was the funniest newspaper story he remembered in his entire experience. And of course the facts about the jail conditions were an inseparable part of the fun. What “made” the story was precisely this—that eleven clean and well-educated and refined young idealists were taken and shut up all night in steel cells, were put in prison clothes and set to work on a stone-pile. The fact that the cells were alive with lice could not be omitted, if you were to appreciate the joke on a well-known charity-worker of Philadelphia, now advertising manager of the “New Republic,” who figured in a poem as “some beast that rasps his vermin-haunted hide.” The fact that the food served in the jail was vile was necessary to set off the joke that the author of “The Jungle” had made a bolt for an ice-cream parlor as soon as he was released. And so on.
I look back upon my life of nearly twenty years of muck-raking, and am able to put my finger on exactly one concrete benefit that I have brought to mankind. Twenty or more men who are serving life-sentences in the Newcastle County Workhouse owe it to me that they get every now and then a glimpse of the sunlight and a breath of fresh air! These men know that they owe it to me, and I have the thought of their gratitude to warm my heart when I am tempted by “the blues.” One of our eleven Sabbath “gamesters,” Donald Stephens, became in war-time a conscientious objector, and was sentenced to the Newcastle County Workhouse in real earnest. He was recently released, and wrote me about his experiences; I quote:
You will be pleased to learn that the short visit we Ardenites paid that institution some years back and the publicity you gave to conditions then led to social improvements—chief of which was thebuilding of an outside recreation yard. Some of the old-timers expressed heartfelt appreciation for the good work you did.
In view of this can you blame me if I am pursued by the thought of how much we could do to remedy social evils, if only we had an honest and disinterested press? Also, can you blame me if I stored away in my mind for future reference the fact that when it is necessary to get some important news into the papers, I can manage it by getting myself sent to jail? This is a discovery which is made, sooner or later, by all social reformers; and so going to jail becomes a popular diversion and an honorable public service.
CHAPTER XVIIIAN ESSENTIAL MONOGAMIST
The adventure of Sabbath “gaming” served as a curtain raiser to the great tragedy of my life. I pause on the brink of this tragedy, hesitating to take the plunge, even in memory; hesitating for the reader’s sake as much as for my own. I ask myself, “Will anybody endure to read a detailed statement of the grievances of one man, at a time when so many millions of men are suffering?” Again, reader, let me beg you to believe that I am not writing this book to defend myself. Amid the terrific events that are going on in the world at this hour, I would not take ten minutes of my time for such a purpose.
I am telling this story in defense of a cause. It was not I, but the cause, that was maimed and tortured through these years, and any other man in my place would have met my experience. The matter at issue in this book is not the character of Upton Sinclair, but the character of the machinery upon which you rely every day of your life for news of the world about you. If that machinery can be used deliberately and systematically to lie about Upton Sinclair, it can be used to disorganize the people’s movement throughout the world, and to set back the coming of Social Justice.
I grope in my mind for a simile to make clear how I feel about this book, how I would have you feel. Say to yourself that Upton Sinclair is a guinea-pig—surely a sufficiently unpretentious creature! It would be entirely preposterous of a guinea-pig to expect that a book should be written about him, or that a research-laboratory should devote its attention to him. But the scientist reaches into a pen full of guinea-pigs, and catches up one by the neck, and makes him the subject of an experiment—removes his thyroid gland, let us say, or gives him an injection of a serum. So suddenly it becomes of the utmost consequence what happens to this guinea-pig. Trained experts take his temperature every ten minutes; they keep a chart of his pulse, they watch his respiration, they analyze his excretions; and nobody thinksthis preposterous—on the contrary, every man of science understands that the condition of this guinea-pig may be of greater moment to mankind than the fall of an empire.
So it is that I am giving this story; giving everything—because that is what science requires. In the case of the great tragedy of my life, my divorce scandal, I confront the ordeal with as much shrinking as ever any guinea-pig exhibited. During all the time of this affair, I refused again and again, in spite of great provocation, to say a public word in my own defense; nor have I ever told the story, except to a few intimate friends. The prospect of having to bring it up again was the cause of my putting off writing this book for several years.
Obviously, the story must be told. It is generally believed that there was something in the affair discreditable to me, and if now I pass it over, my critics will say: “Ah, yes! He is quite willing to play the game of frankness, so long as the cards run his way; but when his luck changes, then suddenly he gets ‘cold feet,’ and retires from the game!” Anyone can see that will not do; I must either tell this story, or I must leave the book unwritten. Having decided that it is my duty to write the book, I proceed to the story. I shall tell just as little as I have to tell, in order to make clear the part played by the newspapers. More especially, I shall do my best to spare the feelings of my former wife and her family. My former wife has remarried, and neither her maiden name nor her present name is anybody’s concern in this book.
In Ellen Key’s “Love and Marriage” occurs a passage explaining that while monogamy is probably the best marital arrangement for the majority of people, there are some individuals so constituted that monogamy is unsatisfactory to them; they find that the fulfillment of their nature requires that they should have more than one love at one time. When my former wife came upon that passage, she brought it to me in triumph. Here was the thesis upon which she had been arguing for many years, and here was a woman, recognized as a great teacher, who believed as she did. I do no unkindness to my former wife in making this statement, because she was accustomed to quote the passage to every one she met, and she defended it in published writings.
Now, I have a respect for Ellen Key’s personality, andfor many of her ideas. I admit that she may know more about the nature of woman than I do, and may be correct in her statements as to the love-needs and the love-rights of some women. All I could say was that I found the idea offensive, and I would part company with anyone who acted upon it. What men and women might agree to do in some far-off blissful future I did not attempt to say, but for the present we lived in a world in which venereal disease was an unforgettable menace, and on this account if no other, one had the right to demand marital fidelity. I argued this question through long years, and my former wife found my arguments tiresome and oppressive. To the newspapers she described me as “an essential monogamist,” a phrase which gave great glee to the “Tenderloin” loungers and the newspaper wits who serve them. Just how these wits reconciled the phrase with the charge that I was a “free-lover,” I can not explain, nor have the wits explained it.
Now ordinarily, when Americans find that they are hopelessly disagreed upon such a question, they proceed to establish a residence in Reno or Texas. Etiquette requires that the man should pay all the expenses, and also that he should bear the odium involved. In one of Bernard Shaw’s plays he explains that the English law requires not merely infidelity, but cruelty in the presence of witnesses, and therefore the convention has come to be that the man and woman shall repair to the garden, and there in the presence of the gardener the husband shall knock his wife into a flower-bed. I remember some years ago Mr. Booth Tarkington stepped off a steamer from Europe and was informed by reporters that his wife was suing him for divorce, alleging cruelty; he was asked for a comment, and replied, graciously: “When one’s wife accuses one of cruelty, no gentleman would think of making a reply.”
I was prepared to play my part as a gentleman according to this standard, and several times I made the necessary practical arrangements; but each time the other party changed her mind. She pleaded that the world attached a certain stigma to “a divorced woman”; therefore, it was cruel and unkind for a man to insist upon having a divorce. I might at least allow her the protection of my name. To this argument I was weak enough to yield.
I had endured for some eight years this kind of domesticprecariousness; a maelstrom in which a man’s physical, mental, and moral integrity are subtly and bewilderingly tossed and buffeted and maimed. But finally I came upon certain facts which decided me to put an end to it. It happened in midsummer, when my lawyer was in the country, and in my haste to consult him I made the greatest blunder of my life. I sent a telegram inquiring whether a letter of admission from the other party was evidence in a divorce-suit in New York State; and to this telegram I signed my name.
I have since been told that it is a regular custom of the “yellow” journals, in places where the “smart set” or other people of prominence gather, to maintain relations with telegraph-clerks. When telegrams containing news or hints of news are filed, the clerk furnishes a copy to the newspaper, and is paid according to the importance of the “tip.” Three or four hours after I filed that telegram, I was called to the telephone by the “New York American,” which told me they had information that I was bringing suit for divorce. I was astounded, for I had not mentioned the matter to a soul. At first I denied the fact, but they said their information was positive, and they would publish the story. So it was a choice between having a false story or a true story made known, and I replied, “I will prepare a statement and send it to you some time this evening.” I prepared the briefest possible statement, to the effect that my wife had left me with another man, and had written to that effect, and that I was preparing to bring suit. The last paragraph read:
I make this statement because I have just learned that word of my intention has reached one newspaper, and I would rather the real facts were printed than anybody’s conjectures. I have nothing to add to this statement and I respectfully ask to be spared requests for interviews.
I sent this statement, and next morning the “American” published it on the front page, with my picture, and a picture of my former wife, and a picture of a boy which was not our boy, but a “fake.” I quote a few lines: