The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair

by Upton Sinclair

X

So ended my attempt to raise up and train a new socialist writer. It is an ugly story to tell on a man—the only mean story in this amiable book, you may note. Nothing could hire me to tell it—except for a later development, which you have still to hear.

Ten years passed, and Mike was all but forgotten. I started a magazine and in it published The Profits of Religion, dealing with the churches by the method of economic interpretation. Mike, being now a champion of Roman Catholicism—his publishers were introducing him as “one of the most influential lay Catholics of America”—sallied forth to destroy my book. That was all right; I grant every man a right to disagree with me—the more the merrier, it is all advertising. But Mike found his task difficult, for the reason that my statements in The Profits of Religion are derived from Catholic sources—devotional works, papal decrees, pastoral letters, editorials in church papers—everything with the holy imprimatur, nihil obstat.

So, instead of attacking the book, Mike chose to attack its author. He accused me of being a writer for gain, and headed his review with the title “A Prophet for Profit”! I have heard that charge many times, but it did seem to me there was one person in America who was barred from making it—and that was my old friend and pensioner, Michael Williams. Since he made it, and published it, it seems to me that the consequences are upon his own head. And that is why I tell the story here. I never saw him again, and never will—for he is dead.

XI

The satiric comedy The Millennium, which I had in my suitcase, made a hit with the leading stage impresario of that time, David Belasco. He agreed to produce it on an elaborate scale in the course of the coming winter. He was fighting the “trust” and had two big theaters in New York, where he put on two big productions every year. But after keeping me waiting for a year, and making many promises, he suddenly made peace with his enemies; he then wanted small shows that could be put on the road, so he threw over The Millennium and produced The Easiest Way, by Eugene Walter, which had only eight characters. So vanished one more of those dreams that haunted me for ten years or more—earning a lot of money and starting another colony.

I got an advance from a publisher, and took my family to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks, rented a little camp, and settled down to the task of weaving into a novel my story of how the elder J. P. Morgan had caused the panic of the previous autumn. The Moneychangers was the title. It was to be a sequel to The Metropolis. I was planning a trilogy to replace the one that had died with Manassas. My plans were still grandiloquent.

When I was gathering material for the book, Lincoln Steffens introduced me to two of my most valuable informants: Samuel Untermyer and James B. Dill. Dill had been the most highly paid corporation lawyer in Wall Street, and had recently been appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in New Jersey. So he was free and could talk; and the stories he told me you wouldn’t believe. I will tell only one. He took me out to his home in New Jersey to spend the night, and when we came into the dining room, he said, “Make a note of this table and that window with the double French doors, I will tell you a story about them.”

This was the story. There was a lawsuit involving several million dollars, and Dill came into possession of a document that would decide the case. He wanted to make certain that this document could not be stolen. He was certain that a desperate attempt would be made to steal it, so he put two or three typists to work all day, and they made a total of twenty-one copies; he sent his office employees out to rent safe-deposit boxes in various banks in and around Wall Street. He sealed the copies in twenty-one envelopes, and one of them contained the original document. He alone knew which bank got the original. He took one of the copies out to his home that evening and said to his butler, “The house will be burglarized tonight, but don’t pay any attention to it. I want them to get what they come for.”

He set the sealed envelope on the corner of his dining-room table; sure enough, the next morning he found that the French windows had been opened and the envelope taken.