The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair

by Upton Sinclair

IV

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 of The 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 of Our Benevolent Feudalism. He and I got into an argument over the war in the columns of The Nation. The argument got too hot for Villard, and he wouldn’t publish my reply; so I paid for a page advertisement in The Nation and 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 in The Nation of June 6, 1923, along with an editorial note. I’m going to reprint that page from The 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 on private 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

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 their policies, 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 Angeles Examiner called 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 the newspapers 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.