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.
V
Moved by the cruelties I had seen, I indulged myself in the pleasure of writing two radical plays—“radical” was a terrible word in those days. Singing Jailbirds portrayed the Industrial Workers of the World, of whom we had met many; they sang in jail and were put “in the hole” for it. They were called “wobblies” because in the early days they had done their first organizing in a restaurant kept by an old Chinaman who could not say IWW but made it “I-wobble-wobble.”
I started with that scene, and then had the wobblies in jail recalling the battles they had fought and the evils they had suffered. There was a lot of singing all through, and the play made a hit when it was produced in Greenwich Village by a group of four young playwrights—one of them was Eugene O’Neill and another was John Dos Passos, who now after forty years has evolved from a rampant radical into a rampant conservative. I was writing for Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture in those days (at $150 per article). I took my boss to the show, and he put up a thousand dollars to keep it going. I, of course, got nothing.
The other play was in blank verse and was called Hell. It portrayed the devils as being bored, and amusing themselves by sending a messenger up to earth to create a great deposit of gold and set all the nations to warring over it. (This was just after World War I, of course.) My fastidious friend, George Sterling, was outraged by my verse, but I had a lot of fun. I found myself a solitary spot on the edge of the Arroyo Seco, and there paced up and down composing it and laughing over it. Dear old Art Young made a delightful cover drawing, and I published the play in pamphlet form; I still have copies, and—who can tell?—somebody might produce it before World War III comes and ends all producing.
Joking aside, I hope to live to see it.