The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair

by Upton Sinclair

III

The most obvious success was with the children. There were fourteen in the colony, and the care they received proved not merely the economics of co-operation but also its morals; our children lived a social life and learned to respect the rights of others, which does not always happen in an individual home. There was a good-sized theater in the building, and this became the children’s separate world. They did most of their own work and enjoyed it; they had their meals in a dining room of their own, with chairs and tables that fitted them, food that agreed with them and was served at proper hours. Now and then they assembled in a children’s parliament and discussed their problems, deciding what was right and what wrong for them. There was a story of a three-year-old popping up with “All in favor say aye!”

There was one full-time employee in this children’s department, the rest of the time being contributed by the various mothers at an agreed rate of compensation. Many persons had laughed at the idea that mothers could co-operate in the care of children, but as a matter of fact our mothers did it without serious trouble. There were different ideas; we had some believers in “libertarian” education, but when it came to the actual working out of theories from day to day, we found that everyone wanted the children to have no more freedom than was consistent with the happiness and peace of others.

I recall only one parent who was permanently dissatisfied. This was a completely respectable and antisocialistic lady from Tennessee, the wife of a surgeon, who was sure that her darlings had to have hot bread every day. So she exercised her right to take them to an individual home. She also took her husband, and the husband, in departing, tried to take our dining room maid as his mistress, but without success. This, needless to say, occasioned sarcastic remarks among our colonists as to socialist versus capitalist “free love.”

It was generally taken for granted among the newspapermen of New York that the purpose for which I had started this colony was to have plenty of mistresses handy. They wrote us up on that basis—not in plain words, for that would have been libel—but by innuendo easily understood. So it was with our socialist colony as with the old-time New England colonies—there were Indians hiding in the bushes, seeking to pierce us with sharp arrows of wit. Reporters came in disguise, and went off and wrote false reports; others came as guests, and went off and ridiculed us because we had beans for lunch.

I do not know of any assemblage of forty adult persons where a higher standard of sexual morals prevailed than at Helicon Hall. Our colonists were for the most part young literary couples who had one or two children and did not know how to fit them into the literary life; in short, they were persons with the same problem as myself. Professor W. P. Montague, of Columbia, had two boys, and his wife was studying to be a doctor of medicine. Maybe, as the old-fashioned moralists argued, she ought to have stayed at home and taken care of her children; but the fact was that she wouldn’t, and found it better to leave the children in care of her fellow colonists than with an ignorant servant.

But it was hard on Montague when persons came as guests, attended our Saturday-night dances, and went off and described him dancing with the dining-room girl. It happened that this was a perfectly respectable girl from Ireland who had been a servant at our farm for a year or two; she was quiet and friendly and liked by everybody. Since none of the colony workers were treated as social inferiors, Minnie danced with everybody else and had a good time; but it didn’t look so harmless in the New York gutter press, and when Montague went to Barnard to lecture the young ladies on philosophy, he was conscious of stern watchfulness on the part of the lady dean of that exclusive institution. Minnie, now many times a grandmother, lives in Berkeley, California, and writes to me now and then.

Montague came to us innocent of social theories and even of knowledge. But presently he found himself backed up against our four-sided fireplace, assailed by ferocious bands of socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, and single taxers. We could not discover that we made any dent in his armor; but presently came rumors that in the Faculty Club of Columbia, where he ate his lunch, he was being denounced as a “red” and finding himself backed up against the wall by ferocious bands of Republicans, Democrats, and Goo-goos (members of the Good Government League). Of course the palest pink in Helicon Hall would have seemed flaming red in Columbia.