XIV
Roosevelt sent me a message by Frank Doubleday: “Tell Sinclair to go home and let me run the country for a while.” But I did not accept the advice. I broached to Everybody’s Magazine the idea of a series of articles exposing the conditions under which children worked in industry. They thought this a promising idea and agreed to use a series of eight or ten such articles. Alas, being new at the game, I omitted to tie them down with a contract. I took Mrs. Bloor and went down to the glass factories of southern New Jersey in the heat of midsummer, and I spent my time watching little boys of ten and twelve working all night in front of red-hot furnaces. One story I remember: an exhausted child staggering home at daybreak, falling asleep on the railroad tracks, and being run over by a train. I lived in the homes of these workers, I talked with them and ate their food, and in later years I put some of them into my books. Always the critics say—without knowing anything about it—that I “idealize” these characters. I can only say that if there is any finer type in the world than the humble workingman who has adopted brotherhood as his religion and sacrifices his time and money and often his job for his faith, I have not encountered it.
I went next to the Allegheny steel country, the real headquarters of American wage slavery in those old days. What I wrote horrified Everybody’s, and they changed their minds about my series. So I had to rest, whether I would or not.
It was high time; for one of my teeth became ulcerated, and I had a painful time, wandering about the city of Trenton on a Sunday, trying in vain to find a dentist. After two nights of suffering I went to a dentist in New York, had the tooth drilled through, and for the first time in my life nearly fainted. Afterward I staggered out, went into the first hotel I saw, and got a room and fell on the bed. It happened to be a fashionable hotel, and this gave great glee to the newspapers, which were pleased to discover signs of leisure-class follies in a socialist.
There is a saying among women that every child costs a tooth. With me it read: every crusade costs a tooth. Of course this wasn’t necessary; it was not merely overwork but ignorance of diet, the eating of white flour and sugar and other denatured foods, and pouring into the drain pipe the mineral salts from fruits and vegetables. But I did not know anything about all this; my college education, which had left out socialism, and money, and love and marriage, had also left out diet and health. Instead of such things, I had learned what a hapax legomenon is, and a pons asinorum, and a glyptocrinus decadactylus—and was proud of possessing such wisdom.
Another activity during that summer and autumn of 1906 was an effort to turn The Jungle into a play. Arch and Edgar Selwyn were playbrokers at this time and suggested Edgar’s wife as my collaborator. Margaret Mayo afterward wrote a highly successful farce-comedy, Baby Mine, but The Jungle was something different, and I fear we made a poor dramatization. We had a manager who was thinking of nothing but making money, and some slapstick comedians put in dubious jokes that I, in my innocence, did not recognize until I heard the gallery tittering. The play came to New York for six weeks and lost money—or so I was told by the managers, with whom I had invested three thousand dollars.
Concerning The Jungle I wrote that “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” I helped to clean up the yards and improve the country’s meat supply. Now the workers have strong unions and, I hope, are able to look out for themselves.