The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair

by Upton Sinclair

I

A reader of this manuscript asked the question: “Just what do you think you have accomplished in your long lifetime?” I give a few specific answers.

I begin with a certainty. At the age of twenty-eight I helped to clean and protect the meat that comes to your table. I followed that matter through to the end. I put the shocking facts into a book that went around the world in both directions. I set forth the details at President Theodore Roosevelt’s lunch table in the White House, and later put them before his trusted investigators. I put their true report on the front page of the New York Times, and I followed it up with letters to Congressmen. I saw the laws passed; from friends in the Chicago stockyards, I learned that they were enforced. The stockyard workers now have strong unions; I know some of their officials, and if the old conditions had come back, I would have been told of it and would be telling it here.

Second, I know that we still have many bad and prejudiced newspapers, but many are better than they were. I think that The Brass Check helped to bring about the improvement. It also encouraged newspapermen to form a union. And the guild, among other things, has improved the quality of newspapers.

Third, I know that our “mourning parade” before the offices of Standard Oil in New York not merely ended slavery in the mining camps in the Rocky Mountains but also changed the life course of the Rockefeller family; and this has set an example to others of our millionaire dynasties—including the Armours and the Fords.

Fourth, I think that Mary Craig Sinclair, with my help, did much to promote an interest in the investigation of psychic phenomena. Professor William McDougall, an Englishman who became known as “the dean of American Psychology,” told us that it was Craig’s demonstrations that decided him to set up the department of parapsychology at Duke University. It was McDougall who appointed J. B. Rhine, and the work that has been done by these two men has made the subject respectable. Mental Radio is now issued by a scientific publishing house.

Fifth, I know that the American Civil Liberties Union, which I helped to organize in New York and of which I started the southern California branch in 1923, has put an end to the oppression of labor in California and made it no longer possible to crowd six hundred strikers into a jail built to hold one hundred.

Sixth, I know that the EPIC campaign of 1934 in California changed the whole reactionary tone of the state. We now have a Democratic governor and a Democratic state legislature, and the Republicans are unhappy. In the depression through which we passed in 1961, no one died of starvation.

Seventh, I know that I had something to do with the development and survival of American democratic ideas, both political and social, in Japan. From 1915 on, practically every book I wrote was translated and published in Japan, and I was informed that a decade or two in that country were known as the Sinkuru Jidai, which means “the Sinclair Era.” Every one of the Lanny Budd books was a best seller there; and in September 1960, when the Japanese students appeared on the verge of a procommunist revolution, my faithful translator, Ryo Namikawa, cabled, begging me to send a message in favor of the democratic process of social change. I paid over four hundred dollars to send a cablegram to Shimbun, the biggest newspaper in Japan, and it appeared on the front page the next day. Of course, I cannot say how much that had to do with it. I only know that the students turned away from their communist leadership and chose the democratic process and friendship with America.

Eighth, my two books on the dreadful ravages of alcoholism may have had some effect. The second, called The Cup of Fury, was taken up by the church people, and it has sold over a hundred thousand copies. I get many letters about it.

Ninth. Way back in the year 1905, I started the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, now the League of Industrial Democracy. I had had nine years of college and university, and I hadn’t learned that the modern socialist movement existed. I held that since the educators wouldn’t educate the students, it was up to the students to educate the educators—and this was what happened, partly because so many of our students of those days are educators now.

Tenth and last, there are the Lanny Budd books. They won the cordial praise of George Bernard Shaw (who made them the basis for recommending me for the Nobel Prize), H. G. Wells, Albert Einstein, and Thomas Mann. I worked at those books like a slave for a dozen years, and if they contain errors of historical fact, these have not been pointed out. The books have been translated into a score of languages. They contain the story of the years from 1911 to 1950, and I hope they have spread a little enlightenment through the world.

The English Queen Mary, who failed to hold the French port of Calais, said that when she died, the word “Calais” would be found written on her heart. I don’t know whether anyone will care to examine my heart, but if they do they will find two words there—“Social Justice.” For that is what I have believed in and fought for during sixty-three of my eighty-four years.