We had no income, of course, and everything was done by volunteer labor. Many times I sat up until two or three in the morning, wrapping packages of literature to be mailed to persons who did not always want them and sometimes wrote to say so. One who attended our first meeting was a young student at Wesleyan by the name of Harry Laidler, and for several years it was my dream that some day we might have an income of eighteen dollars per week so that Harry could be our full-time secretary. The organization, now known as the League for Industrial Democracy, has not merely Harry W. Laidler but Norman Thomas also, and has raised about fifty thousand dollars a year. Not so much, compared with the resources of the power trust, but we have interested and trained two generations of socialists, progressives, and liberals. The league has been at the same address, 112 East 19th Street, New York, for some fifty-five years—in itself an achievement; if you want to know about it, send a postcard.
Soon after our start, we organized a mass meeting at Carnegie Hall at which the principal speaker was to be Jack London. I had corresponded with him from the time of his first novel. At this time he had had his great success with The Sea Wolf. He was on the crest of the wave of glory and a hero in the movement of social protest. He was traveling from California to Florida by sea, then by train to New York, and he was due to arrive on the very evening of the meeting. His train was late, and I had been asked to keep the crowd entertained until he arrived. The hall was packed. I was in something of a panic because I didn’t think that I was equal to the assignment. But just as I started for the platform, a roar of cheers broke out—our hero and his wife were walking down the aisle.
Jack was not much taller than I, but he was broadly built—the picture of an athlete. That night he gave us the substance of his famous discourse, “Revolution,” later published in a little red paper pamphlet. The crowd that listened so raptly was not, I must admit, very collegiate. A few students came, but most of the audience was from the Lower East Side; the ushers were Jewish boys and girls wearing red badges. The socialist fervor of that evening now seems like even more ancient history than it is. A good part of it went into the communist movement, of course, and my friend Scott Nearing used to ask me how I could continue to belong to the Socialist Party, made up of lawyers and retired real-estate speculators!
IX
The first chapters of The Jungle had been read by George P. Brett of the Macmillan Company, who was impressed by the book, and gave me an advance of five hundred dollars. The last chapters were not up to standard, because both my health and my money were gone, and a second trip to Chicago, which I had hoped to make, was out of the question. I did the best I could—and those critics who didn’t like the ending ought to have seen it as it was in manuscript! I ran wild at the end, attempting to solve all the problems of America; I put in the Moyer-Haywood case, everything I knew and thought my readers ought to know. I submitted these chapters to a test and got a cruel verdict; the editor of the Appeal came to visit me, and sat in my little living room one evening to hear the story—and fell sound asleep! The polite author went on reading for an hour or so, hoping that his guest would wake up and be spared the embarrassment of being “caught!” (I cut the material out.)
I was called to New York for an interview with Mr. Brett. He wanted me to cut out some of the “blood and guts” from the book; nothing so horrible had ever been published in America—at least not by a respectable concern. Brett had been a discerning but somewhat reserved critic of my manuscripts so far; if I had taken his advice, I would have had an easier time in life—but I would have had to be a different person. Out of his vast publishing experience he now assured me that he could sell three times as many copies of my book if I would only consent to remove the objectionable passages; if I were unwilling to do this, his firm would be compelled to decline the book. I remember taking the problem to Lincoln Steffens, an older muckraker than I. Said he: “It is useless to tell things that are incredible, even though they may be true.” But I could not take his advice; I had to tell the truth, and let people make of it what they could.
I forget who were the other publishers that turned down The Jungle. There were five in all; and by that time I was raging and determined to publish it myself. The editor of the Appeal generously consented to give space to a statement of my troubles. Jack London wrote a rousing manifesto, calling on the socialist movement to rally to the book, which he called “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery. It is alive and warm. It is brutal with life. It is written of sweat and blood, and groans and tears.” I offered a “Sustainer’s Edition,” price $1.20, postpaid, and in a month or two I took in four thousand dollars—more money than I had been able to earn in all the past five years. Success always went to my head, and I became drunk, thinking it was going to be like that the rest of my life; and so I could found a colony, or start a magazine, or produce a play, or win a strike—whatever might be necessary to change the world into what it ought to be.
In this case the first thing I did was to buy a saddle horse for a hundred and twenty-five dollars. It wasn’t as reckless as it sounds because the horse could also be driven to the buggy, and I had to have some form of exercise to help the poor stomach that apparently was not equal to keeping up with the head. Also I had to have some way to get into town quickly, because I now had a business on my hands and had to be sending telegrams and mailing proofs. I had a printing firm in New York at work putting The Jungle into type. Then, just as the work was completed, someone suggested that I offer the book to Doubleday, Page and Company. So I found myself in New York again, for a series of conferences with Walter H. Page and his young assistants.
This publisher and editor played an important part in American history, so I will tell what I saw of him. He was extremely kind and extremely naïve; being good himself, he believed that other people were good; and just as he was swallowed alive by Balfour and other British Tories during World War I, so he was very nearly swallowed by the Chicago packers. Anxious not to do anybody harm in such a good and beautiful world, he submitted the proofs of The Jungle to James Keeley, managing editor of the Chicago Tribune and a highly honorable gentleman, who sent back a thirty-two page report on the book, prepared, so Keeley avowed, by one of his reporters, a disinterested and competent man. I sat down to a luncheon with the firm, at which this report was produced, and I talked for two or three hours, exposing its rascalities. I persuaded the firm to make an investigation of their own, and so they sent out a young lawyer, and the first person this lawyer met in the yards was a publicity agent of the packers. The lawyer mentioned The Jungle, and the agent said, “Oh, yes, I know that book. I read the proofs of it and prepared a thirty-two page report for James Keeley of the Tribune.”