XV
The Communists wanted to have a “Red funeral,” to make a piece of propaganda out of Paul’s death. But Eli interposed his majestic authority; since Paul had repented his evil ways and come back to Jesus, he should be buried according to the rites of the Third Revelation.
So three days later a little pageant wound its way to the top of one of the hills of Paradise. There was a crowd on hand, and a truck with the necessary radio apparatus—never were any of the precious words of Eli lost nowadays; the two hundred thousand radio housewives of California had been notified by the newspapers, and a hundred and ninety thousand of them had put off their marketing to hear this romantic funeral service. Bunny and Rachel and a handful of the reds stood to one side, knowing they were not welcome. Ruth stood near the grave with the weeping family, having on each side, of her a sturdy oil worker—her two brothers-in-law, Andy Bugner and Jerry Black—because she had been violent on occasions, and no one knew what she might do. She was white and fearful in looks, but seemed not to realize the meaning of the big hole dug in the ground, or of the long black box covered with flowers. While Eli was preaching his fervid sermon about the prodigal son who returned, and about the strayed lamb which was found, Ruth stood gazing at the white clouds moving slowly behind the distant hilltops.
She would make them no more trouble. All she wanted was to wander over these hills, and call now and then for the sheep which were no longer there. Sometimes she called Paul, and sometimes she called Bunny, and so they let her wander; until one day she went calling Joe Gundha. The oil workers who were putting up the new derricks and cleaning out the burned wells to put them back on production were new men to the Ross Junior tract—it is the Roscoe Junior tract now, by the way, one of Vernon Roscoe’s four sons being in charge of the job. These new men had never heard about the “roughneck” who had fallen into the discovery well, so they paid no attention to the unhappy girl who wandered here and there calling his name.
It was not till late that night, when Ruth was missing, and the family making a search, that some one told of hearing her call Joe Gundha. Meelie remembered right away, and they put down a hook in the discovery well, which was having to be drilled again, and they brought up a piece of Ruth’s dress; so they put down a three-pronged grab, and brought up the rest of her, and Eli came again, and they buried her alongside Paul, and with Joe Gundha not far away.
You can see those graves, with a picket fence about them, and no derrick for a hundred feet or more. Some day all those unlovely derricks will be gone, and so will the picket fence and the graves. There will be other girls with bare brown legs running over those hills, and they may grow up to be happier women, if men can find some way to chain the black and cruel demon which killed Ruth Watkins and her brother—yes, and Dad also: an evil Power which roams the earth, crippling the bodies of men and women, and luring the nations to destruction by visions of unearned wealth, and the opportunity to enslave and exploit labor.
THE END
Who Owns The Press, and Why?
When you read your daily paper, are you reading facts or propaganda? And whose propaganda?
Who furnishes the raw material for your thoughts about life? Is it honest material?
No man can ask more important questions than these; and here for the first time the questions are answered in a book.
THE BRASS CHECK
A Study of American Journalism
By UPTON SINCLAIR
Read the record of this book to August, 1920: Published in February, 1920; first edition, 23,000 paper-bound copies, sold in two weeks. Second edition, 21,000 paper-bound, sold before it could be put to press. Third edition, 15,000, and fourth edition, 12,000, sold. Fifth edition, 15,000, in press. Paper for sixth edition, 110,000, just shipped from the mill. The third and fourth editions are printed on “number one news;” the sixth will be printed on a carload of lightweight brown wrapping paper—all we could get in a hurry.
The first cloth edition, 16,500 copies, all sold; a carload of paper for the second edition, 40,000 copies, has just reached our printer—and so we dare to advertise!
Ninety thousand copies of a book sold in six months—and published by the author, with no advertising, and only a few scattered reviews! What this means is that the American people want to know the truth about their newspapers. They have found the truth in “The Brass Check” and they are calling for it by telegraph. Put these books on your counter, and you will see, as one doctor wrote us—“they melt away like the snow.”
From the pastor of the Community Church, New York:
“I am writing to thank you for sending me a copy of your new book, “The Brass Check.” Although it arrived only a few days ago, I have already read it through, every word, and have loaned it to one of my colleagues for reading. The book is tremendous. I have never read a more strongly consistent argument or one so formidably buttressed by facts. You have proved your case to the handle. I again take satisfaction in saluting you not only as a great novelist, but as the ablest pamphleteer in America today. I am already passing around the word in my church and taking orders for the book.”—John Haynes Holmes.
440 pages. Cloth $2.00; paper $1.00
UPTON SINCLAIR, Station A, Pasadena, California
JIMMIE HIGGINS
JIMMIE HIGGINS” is the fellow who does the hard work in the job of waking up the workers. Jimmie hates war—all war—and fights against it with heart and soul. But war comes, and Jimmie is drawn into it, whether he will or no. He has many adventures—strikes, jails, munitions explosions, draft-boards, army-camps, submarines and battles. “Jimmie Higgins Goes to War” at last, and when he does he holds back the German army and wins the battle of “Chatty Terry.” But then they send him into Russia to fight the Bolsheviki, and there “Jimmie Higgins Votes for Democracy.”
A picture of the American working-class movement during four years of world-war; all wings of the movement, all the various tendencies and clashing impulses are portrayed. Cloth, $1.50; paper, $1.00.
From “The Candidate”: I have just finished reading the first installment of “Jimmie Higgins” and I am delighted with it. It is the beginning of a great story, a story that will be translated into many languages and be read by eager and interested millions all over the world. I feel that your art will lend itself readily to “Jimmie Higgins,” and that you will be at your best in placing this dear little comrade where he belongs in the Socialist movement. The opening story of your chapter proves that you know him intimately. So do I and I love him with all my heart, even as you do. He has done more for me than I shall ever be able to do for him. Almost anyone can be “The Candidate,” and almost anyone will do for a speaker, but it takes the rarest of qualities to produce a “Jimmie Higgins.” You are painting a superb portrait of our “Jimmie” and I congratulate you.—Eugene V. Debs.
From Mrs. Jack London: Jimmie Higgins is immense. He is real, and so are the other characters. I’m sure you rather fancy Comrade Dr. Service! The beginning of the narrative is delicious with an irresistible loving humor; and as a change comes over it and the Big Medicine begins to work, one realizes by the light of 1918, what you have undertaken to accomplish. The sure touch of your genius is here, Upton Sinclair, and I wish Jack London might read and enjoy.—Charmian London.
From a Socialist Artist: Jimmie Higgins’ start is a master portrayal of that character. I have been out so long on these lecture tours that I can appreciate the picture. I am waiting to see how the story develops. It starts better than “King Coal.”—Ryan Walker.
Cloth $1.50; paper $1.00; postpaid.
UPTON SINCLAIR
Station A, Pasadena, California
They Call Me Carpenter
By UPTON SINCLAIR
WOULD you like to meet Jesus? Would you care to walk down Broadway with him in the year 1922? What would he order for dinner in a lobster palace? What would he do in a beauty parlor? What would he make of a permanent wave? What would he say to Mary Magna, million dollar queen of the movies? And how would he greet the pillars of St. Bartholomew’s Church? How would he behave at strike headquarters? What would he say at a mass-meeting of the “reds”? And what would the American Legion do to him?
From the “Survey”:
“Upton Sinclair has a reputation for rushing in where angels fear to tread. He has done it again and, artist that he is, has mastered the most difficult theme with ease and sureness. That the figure of Jesus is woven into a novel which is glorious fun, in itself will shock many people. But the graphic arts have long been given the liberty of treating His life in a contemporary setting—why not the novelist?
“Heywood Broun and other critics notwithstanding, it must be stated that Sinclair has treated the figure of Christ with a reverence far more sincere than that of writings in which His presence is shrouded in pseudo-mystic inanity. By an artistry borrowed from the technique of modern expressionist fiction, he has combined downright realism with an extravagant imaginativeness in which the appearance of Christ is no more improper than it is in the actual dreams of hundreds of thousands of devout Christians.
“Like all of Sinclair’s writings, this book is, of course, a Socialist tract; but here—in a spirit which entirely destroys Mr. Broun’s charge that he has made Christ the spokesman of one class—he is unmerciful in his exposure of the sins of the poor as well as of the rich, and directs at the comrades in radical movements a sermon which every churchman will gladly endorse.
“It is not necessary to recommend a book that will find its way into thousands of homes. Incidentally one wonders how a story so colloquially American—Mr. Broun considers this bad taste—can possibly be translated into the Hungarian, the Chinese and the dozen or so other languages in which Sinclair’s books are devoured by the common people of the world.”
Single copy, cloth, $1.50; paper, $1.00, postpaid.
UPTON SINCLAIR, Station A, Pasadena, California
A New Novel by Upton Sinclair
100%
THE STORY OF A PATRIOT
WOULD you like to go behind the scenes and see the “invisible government” of your country saving you from the Bolsheviks and the Reds? Would you like to meet the secret agents and provocateurs of “Big Business,” to know what they look like, how they talk and what they are doing to make the world safe for democracy? Several of these gentlemen have been haunting the home of Upton Sinclair during the past three years and he has had the idea of turning the tables and investigating the investigators. He has put one of them, Peter Gudge by name, into a book, together with Peter’s lady-loves, and his wife, and his boss and a whole group of his fellow-agents and their employers.
The hero of this book is a red-blooded, 100% American, a “he-man” and no mollycoddle. He begins with the Mooney case, and goes through half a dozen big cases of which you have heard. His story is a fact-story of America from 1916 to 1920, and will make a bigger sensation than “The Jungle.” Albert Rhys Williams, author of “Lenin” and “In the Claws of the German Eagle,” read the MS. and wrote:
“This is the first novel of yours that I have read through with real interest. It is your most timely work, and is bound to make a sensation. I venture that you will have even more trouble than you had with ‘The Brass Check’—in getting the books printed fast enough.”
Single copy, cloth, $1.50 postpaid
UPTON SINCLAIR
Station A, Pasadena, California
A book which has been absolutely boycotted by the literary reviews of America.
THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
By Upton Sinclair
A STUDY of Supernaturalism as a Source of Income and a Shield to Privilege; the first examination in any language of institutionalized religion from the economic point of view. “Has the labour as well as the merit of breaking virgin soil,” writes Joseph McCabe. The book has had practically no advertising and only two or three reviews in radical publications; yet forty thousand copies have been sold in the first year.
From the Rev. John Haynes Holmes: “I must confess that it has fairly made me writhe to read these pages, not because they are untrue or unfair, but on the contrary, because I know them to be the real facts. I love the church as I love my home, and therefore it is no pleasant experience to be made to face such a story as this which you have told. It had to be done, however, and I am glad you have done it, for my interest in the church, after all, is more or less incidental, whereas my interest in religion is a fundamental thing. . . . Let me repeat again that I feel that you have done us all a service in the writing of this book. Our churches today, like those of ancient Palestine, are the abode of Pharisees and scribes. It is as spiritual and helpful a thing now as it was in Jesus’ day for that fact to be revealed.”
From Luther Burbank: “No one has ever told ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’ more faithfully than Upton Sinclair in ‘The Profits of Religion.’ ”
From Louis Untermeyer: “Let me add my quavering alto to the chorus of applause of ‘The Profits of Religion.’ It is something more than a book—it is a Work!”
Cloth $1.50; paper $1.00
Concerning
The Jungle
Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself famous has there been such an example of world-wide celebrity won in a day by a book as has come to Upton Sinclair.—New York Evening World.
It is a book that does for modern industrial slavery what “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” did for black slavery. But the work is done far better and more accurately in “The Jungle” than in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”—Arthur Brisbane in the New York Evening Journal.
I never expected to read a serial. I am reading “The Jungle,” and I should be afraid to trust myself to tell how it affects me. It is a great work. I have a feeling that you yourself will be dazed some day by the excitement about it. It is impossible that such a power should not be felt. It is so simple, so true, so tragic and so human. It is so eloquent, and yet so exact. I must restrain myself or you may misunderstand.—David Graham Phillips.
In this fearful story the horrors of industrial slavery are as vividly drawn as if by lightning. It marks an epoch in revolutionary literature.—Eugene V. Debs.
Mr. Heinemann isn’t a man to bungle;
He’s published a book which is called “The Jungle.”
It’s written by Upton Sinclair, who
Appears to have heard a thing or two
About Chicago and what men do
Who live in that city—a loathsome crew.
It’s there that the stockyards reek with blood,
And the poor man dies, as he lives, in mud;
The Trusts are wealthy beyond compare,
And the bosses are all triumphant there,
And everything rushes without a skid
To be plunged in a hell which has lost its lid.
For a country where things like that are done
There’s just one remedy, only one,
A latter-day Upton Sinclairism
Which the rest of us know as Socialism.
Here’s luck to the book! It will make you cower,
For it’s written with wonderful, thrilling power.
It grips your throat with a grip Titanic,
And scatters shams with a force volcanic.
Go buy the book, for I judge you need it,
And when you have bought it, read it, read it.
—Punch (London).
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.
Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.