At 3 A.M. on Sunday, March 7,1907, Upton Sinclair awakened to the smell of smoke and cries of fire. He made his way outside in his half-burned nightshirt and stood in the snow looking back at the flaming structure. With increasing despair, he watched the “beautiful utopia flame and roar, until it crashed in and died away to a dull glow.”
It was Helicon Hall, the utopian paradise he started just four months earlier, created on the site of a former luxurious boys’ school located on seven acres near Englewood, New Jersey. Helicon Hall opened on November 1, 1906, with twelve families and hopes of eventually attracting hundreds more utopian-minded authors, poets, and colleagues. Cynical journalists said Sinclair built it as a “free love nest” just to have mistresses available. Despite the cynics, it was a successful albeit brief experiment in communal living, with the families cooperating and upholding “high moral standards,” as Sinclair was quick to point out.
Helicon Hall fulfilled Sinclair’s longtime dream—to build a utopian community that would herald the virtues of socialism. He invested in it $30,000 earned from The Jungle, his best-selling novel about the Chicago stockyards. But his dream turned into ashes.
Sinclair defended the experiment, saying, “I have lived in the future.” Later he would note, “What other group ever raised a janitor to win the Nobel Prize?” The janitor was Sinclair Lewis, who worked at Helicon Hall.
There were nasty rumors that Helicon Hall was burned down to collect on the insurance. In fact the insurance company paid off only about two-thirds of the value, and Sinclair paid all the other debts off himself. It was the end of his Jungle fortune. Disheartened by the tragedy, Sinclair retreated to Bermuda with his wife, Meta, son, David, and a colleague, Michael Williams, one of the Helicon Hall colonists, to form a two-family utopia. Williams and Sinclair collaborated on a health book, Good Health and How We Won It, describing Sinclair’s diverse diets and sometimes erratic eating habits. He was always looking for a diet to help him “overwork.”
It was here, during the winter of 1907, while recovering from the Helicon Hall loss, that he looked ninety-three years into the future and wrote a play—The Millennium—“as a means of diverting the writer’s mind from thoughts of that tragic event.” The Millennium was an abrupt departure from Sinclair’s earnest investigative expository form of writing. Unlike much of his work, it demanded reform indirectly, in the guise of science fiction. It was one of the first, if not the first, of thirty plays Sinclair wrote—a pure fantasy, a farce, a humorous vehicle with which to attack capitalism and advocate socialism. It also gave him an opportunity to fantasize about the expectations he had had for Helicon Hall.
David Belasco, the Andrew Lloyd Webber of his time, was intrigued by the play and later told Sinclair he wanted to produce it “on an elaborate scale” for Broadway. The possibility excited Sinclair, since he wanted the money to fund another utopian colony. Sinclair was so desperate to have The Millennium produced that when Belasco asked him to make some changes, he urged Belasco to change the play in any way he wanted, a rare concession from Sinclair. But it was not to be. After making Sinclair wait for a year or more and breaking a series of promises, Belasco rejected The Millennium and instead chose a small production he could put on the road.
The play was never produced or published, and it went through a series of name changes, from The Millennium to The Chosen People: A Comedy in Four Acts to The Millennium: A Farce Comedy of the Future, and finally to The Millennium: A Comedy of the Year 2000. Sinclair rewrote the play as a serial, and it was published in Appeal to Reason in 1914. He self-published it as a novel under the final title in 1924. While Sinclair thought that all copies of the original play were lost, as he laments in his foreword to the novel, the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana in Bloomington has a typed draft of The Millennium in play form.
If Upton Sinclair were alive today he would be an internationally renowned celebrity. His face and name would be as familiar to you as that of Elvis Presley or Ronald Reagan.
Upton Sinclair would be a regular cover subject for the National Enquirer; he would represent the Left on CNN’s Crossfire program; he’d be featured on the covers of Time and Newsweek as a rabble-rouser; he would be a popular contributor to Harper’s, The Nation, The Progressive, Village Voice, as well as the op ed pages of The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times; he would be a confidante of Bill Clinton, Fidel Castro, and other international heads of state; he would fill lecture halls at university campuses throughout the country; he would compete with Deepak Chopra as the nation’s health guru; he would be a loquacious guest on The Late Show With David Letterman; he would turn his Lanny Budd series of eleven novels into the greatest TV miniseries since Roots; he would be a guest on the Art Bell radio program discussing his Utopian vision, psychic phenomena, and Y2K; he would co-produce a high-tech film based on his novel, The Millennium, with George Lucas; his personal website: www.uptonsinclair.com, would get thousands of hits a day; and, no doubt, Upton Sinclair would be a “Hollywood Square.”
Sinclair surely had all the ingredients necessary to be an international media star: he was the Quixotic crusader who fought every injustice he ever saw; he was a prodigious author of both fiction and non-fiction books; he was a propagandist for every lost cause; he was a poet; he was a playwright; he was a Pulitzer Prize winner; he was a practicing health faddist who wrote best selling diet books; he was a Socialist who won the Democratic nomination for governor of California; he had one of the most widely publicized divorce battles of his time; he knew and corresponded with many of the greatest personalities in the world, including Joseph Stalin, Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Mann, Luther Burbank, John Dewey, H.L. Mencken, H.G. Wells, and D.H. Lawrence.
Yet when Sinclair died peacefully in 1968 at the age of ninety in a nursing home near Bound Brook, New Jersey, his passing was little noticed. A slim book titled Upton Sinclair: Biographical and Critical Opinions, published in just 150 copies in 1972, referred to him as “a prophet without honor in his own country.”
Biographer Leon Harris summed up his life as follows:
Upton Sinclair was born on September 20, 1878, and died November 25, 1968. Until 1905, he was an unknown failure. For forty years thereafter he was America’s most important writer; that is, he was more responsible than any other writer for the changing view Americans had of themselves, their rights, and their reasonable expectations. But by the time he died, Sinclair was again virtually unknown.
Sinclair was born in near poverty to a southern aristocrat mother who was a suffragette and to a pot-bellied salesman father who drank himself to death. He was a precocious child who taught himself to read by the time he was five years old. He started City College of New York (CCNY) at the age of fourteen and after graduation in 1897 entered Columbia University as a special graduate student.
While at CCNY he observed a student who sold an article to a magazine and wondered why he couldn’t do that himself. And he did, writing and selling children’s stories, jokes, serials, and poems. But it was in 1897, when he started at Columbia, that he established the writing regime that would stay with him for the rest of his life. Although never in the military, he wrote what he called “half-dime novels” under the pseudonyms of Lieutenant Garrison and Ensign Clarke Fitch for the Army and Navy Weekly from 1897 to 1900.
In the spring of 1900 he left Columbia, frustrated by the hypocrisy and greed he saw there and in politics, rented a small cabin on Lake Massawippi near Quebec, and wrote “the great American novel.” Titled Springtime and Harvest, it was a vapid story of a “woman’s soul redeemed by high and noble love.” While publishers did not share his vision of the book, it set a precedent that would also mark his writing career—he published it himself.
Undeterred by the critical rejection of Springtime, Sinclair went on to write The Journal of Arthur Stirling, a semiautobiographical novel published in 1903; Prince Hagen, a fantasy about greed and power on Wall Street (1903); Manassas, a novel about the Civil War (1904); and A Captain of Industry, which traced the rise and fall of a greedy Wall Street entrepreneur (1906). All of these were greeted by mostly negative reviews and few sales.
It was not until his famed exposé of the meatpacking yards in Chicago, The Jungle, in 1906 that Sinclair started to receive the attention he sought. Here again, however, he was forced to publish the book himself before a publishing house would take it on. To his surprise, The Jungle ignited the moral outrage of the nation and led to legislative reforms, including the creation of the Food and Drug Administration.
With The Jungle, Sinclair had arrived. The New York Evening World reported, “Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself famous has there been such an example of worldwide celebrity won in a day by a book as has come to Upton Sinclair.”
Sinclair’s writing between 1908 and 1924 included novels: The Metropolis; The Money Changers; Samuel: The Seeker; Love’s Pilgrimage; Damaged Goods; Sylvia; Sylvia’s Marriage; King Coal; Jimmie Higgins; 100 Percent: The Story of a Patriot; and They Call Me Carpenter; plays: The Nature Woman; The Machine; The Second Story Man; Prince Hagen; The Pot Boiler; and Hell; and nonfiction books: The Fasting Cure; The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest; The Profits of Religion; The Brass Check; The Book of Life; The Goose-Step; and The Goslings.
But he hadn’t forgotten The Millennium. In 1914 he dug out the original play and rewrote it as a humorous science fiction novel, to be serialized in a magazine. As happened in many other cases, book publishers subsequently rejected it, and he self-published it in book form in 1924. While it received little attention in the United States, it was well received when published abroad in 1929. A few reviewers criticized Sinclair for departing from his usual serious muckraking style, but most lauded him for his new approach.
The Singapore Straits Times (November 15, 1929) said, “It is Upton Sinclair in a new vein and it is well worth mining for the rich ore it contains”; The Belfast New Letter (October 12, 1929) called The Millennium “a vivid and caustic skit on the evolution of human society”; and the Birmingham Mail (October 3, 1929) cited it as “a thoroughly rollicking farce!”
In writing the first version of The Millennium in 1907, Upton Sinclair looked forward to the year 2000 as a time when socialism might succeed. However, in the play this success came about accidentally through a cataclysmic event rather than through social protest or revolution, as Sinclair had always believed it would.
With biting sarcasm and caricatures rather than characters, Sinclair depicts the zenith of capitalism with the construction of the Pleasure Palace, a glittering hundred-story high structure in the middle of Central Park. During the grand opening of the towering building in April 2000, a scientific experiment with radiumite explodes, killing every living creature throughout the world except eleven of the people from the Pleasure Palace, who escape the deadly rays by flying high in the sky in a revolutionary 1,000-mph airplane called “The Monarch of the Air!”
The eleven survivors, who represent various social classes, struggle to rebuild their lives by re-creating various stages of social evolution, including slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. The end of capitalism is marked by the death of the last capitalist, who starves to death because he is too lazy to prepare his own food. When all else has failed, the ten survivors create a successful utopian society on the lush grounds of a grand country estate in the Pocantico Hills above the Hudson River. The choice of the Pocantico Hills as the site for a fictional utopian community is not surprising; that’s where John D. Rockefeller Jr., one of Sinclair’s major adversaries, had his own personal palatial estate.
In 1907, Sinclair’s visions of supersonic flight, laser guns, nuclear radiation, cordless microphones, chemically polluted food, global positioning systems, music light shows, and cell phones were all prophetic in nature: indeed, all have been realized. A towering 100-story structure in Manhattan was not a reality until 1931, when the 102-story Empire State Building was raised. In another instance, Sinclair describes how the capitalists discovered a life-saving food supply but withheld it from individuals unwilling to work as slaves for it. He draws a disturbing comparison between capitalism and slavery. Most of Sinclair’s favorite targets—the wealthy, monopolies, the press, religion, aesthetes, and scientists—were represented in The Millennium.
Of course, the near-cataclysmic end of the world and the triumph of socialism over capitalism portrayed by Sinclair have not yet come to pass.
In the end, The Millennium may be less a prophecy for the year 2000 than a chronicle of what the social structure was like in the early 1900s. In harsh contrast to the equitable utopian society Sinclair envisioned for the year 2000, the gap between the wealthy and the poor in the United States has increased significantly since the start of the twentieth century.
In 1931, a prestigious group of nineteen internationally renowned academicians, led by George Bernard Shaw, nominated Sinclair for the Nobel Prize in Literature for his “outstanding achievement in the contemporary fiction of all lands, for their mastery of fact, for their social vision, for consistent, honest, and courageous thinking, for humanitarian passion, and for vitality and sweep of creative art.” Enemies of Sinclair joined with supporters of other candidates to attack him, and ultimately deprive him of this honor.
One key to Sinclair’s success was his exceptional work ethic. He was easily one of the most prolific writers in history, from the beginning of his career in 1897, when he could write a novel in a week, to the final publication of his autobiography in 1962. He would write four to six hours a day, day after day, wherever he was, whatever obstacles he was facing. During a writing career that spanned nearly seven decades, Sinclair would write more than ninety books, thirty plays, and an unknown number of articles, stories, pamphlets, and poems. His work was translated into some sixty languages and published in a quantity that places Sinclair among the most popular writers of all time.
Another factor contributing to his success was his extraordinary ability to focus his thoughts and writing. His focus was on social justice, and nearly all his writing and actions resound of the struggle for man’s equality. As he wrote, “My books come out of deep conviction, and it is no fun writing them—yet when I have finished one, it is only a few weeks before I am walking up and down in my garden, taking a new load of troubles into my mind.”
Unlike other writers of the time, he wrote not about the way things were, but rather about the way they ought to be, or about the people trying to change them: “All my life I have tried to have something worthwhile to say, and to write it so that the ordinary man and woman can get my meaning.... With political freedom and economic justice mankind can abolish poverty and war from the earth; we have the tools to do it, and all we need is the understanding. That conviction runs through all my books, and everything I have written on every subject.”
Sinclair was aware that his commitment to a single theme, the fight against social injustice, and the occasional outrageous antics with which he attracted attention to his message brought him considerable criticism. He was once arrested for trying to read the Bill of Rights to striking dockworkers in San Pedro, California. When he told Albert Einstein that someone had called his social protests “undignified,” Einstein gave him a large photo of himself with six lines of verse, inscribed in colloquial German. Translated, it read:
Whom does the dirtiest pot not attack?
Who hits the world on the hollow tooth?
Who spurns the now and swears by the morrow?
Who takes no care about being “undignified”?
The Sinclair is the valiant man
If anyone, then I can attest to it.
It was signed, “In heartiness, Albert Einstein.”
There are several explanations why Upton Sinclair didn’t achieve the respect and success he deserved in the United States, but did so abroad.
First, and probably most important, he was a socialist and proud of it. He believed in socialism as a solution to man’s problems, he wrote about the evils of capitalism and the virtues of socialism, and he practiced what he wrote. He put his life savings into Helicon Hall, a utopian society; he ran for several political offices as a socialist; and he mortgaged his home to produce a film about the plight of Mexican Indians.
His political views might have been chic in the early twentieth century and understandable and acceptable in the 1930s, but they were not acceptable in the late 1940s and ’50s. Despite the Red terror that gripped the nation, ignited by reactionary anti-Communist Senator Joseph McCarthy, Sinclair adhered to his socialist beliefs.
Secondly, Sinclair admittedly was not a great writer in terms of style and aesthetics. He wrote for the people, the masses, and not for the critics, reviewers, or intellectuals. His experience in writing “half-dime” novels had prepared him to write for the mass circulation audience. Sinclair’s easily understood characters and plots were not fashionable at a time when authors like William Faulkner and James Joyce were intriguing the critics with complex, difficult characters and plots. He said that he always tried to have something worthwhile to say and to write it so that “the ordinary man and woman can get my meaning”: “I have written many kinds of books—novels, plays, pamphlets, treatises on politics and economics, on religion and love and the art of life. I have even written some poems, but not in the modern manner. It is always possible to understand what I am trying to say.”
Indeed, Sinclair was a populist, not an aesthete. But above all, Sinclair was a muckraker whose words improved the lives of millions of people. If critics rejected Sinclair on his failed aesthetic impact, Sinclair rejected the critics because they failed to see his social impact.
Finally, Upton Sinclair recognized his own talents and was not loath to promote himself, often even to the point of alienating some of his own friends. He was quick to point out, however that while he sought publicity, it was “for books and causes, not for myself.” He wrote the first of a number of autobiographies, the thinly disguised Journal of Arthur Stirling, at age twenty-five, after publishing only one very unsuccessful novel, Springtime and Harvest. On the title page of another autobiography, Candid Reminiscences: My First Thirty Years, published in 1932, he wrote, “The story of how Sinclair came to write his novels; the story of his marriage and his sensational divorce; the amazing spiritual and humanitarian flowering of a boy of the streets into a genius; the names, dates and places which his enemies have tried to keep him from giving—all is here, the whole amazing, incredible story, told by the man who lived it!”
If Sinclair thought rather well of himself, he held no such regard for the media. That his exposé of newspapers, The Brass Check, took its title from the metal token paid to prostitutes after services rendered did not enhance his image with the press.
But for every critic of Sinclair, there were many others who recognized his talents and respected his work. Author Irving Stone thought Sinclair was one of the wisest and best-informed men in the world: “He has the great gift of penetration, he stabs through pretence, sham, hypocrisy, double-talk and double-dealing like a steel spoke through butter; but even more important than his knowledge and the keenness of his international analysis, is the profound goodness of his heart.” And George Bernard Shaw told Sinclair, “When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime, I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to the authorities, but to your novels.”
After reading The Jungle, Jack London said, “Here it is at last! The book we have been waiting for these many years! The Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery! Comrade Sinclair’s book, The Jungle! And what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for black slaves, The Jungle has a large chance to do for the white slaves of today.”
Bertrand Russell admired Sinclair’s books and “got into trouble with various Americans by quoting them as an authority on American conditions.” To Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sinclair was “one of the greatest novelists in the world, the Zola of America”; to Albert Einstein, Sinclair was “one of the sharpest observers of our time.” American personalities of our own time who acknowledge being influenced by Sinclair include Eric Severeid, Walter Cronkite, Norman Mailer, William Shirer, John Kenneth Galbraith, Allen Ginsberg, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Upton Sinclair was specially admired in other countries. Pointing out the disparity between his status in the United States and elsewhere in the world, Sinclair once noted that American publishers sold a total of less than three thousand copies of his novel Sylvia’s Marriage, while his British publisher sold more than a hundred thousand copies in a single year.
Nearly a hundred years after its publication, The Jungle is still noted, cited, referred to, and generally held up as a classic example of the golden age of muckraking. Others of his books are occasionally reprinted, including The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair, Oil! Dragon’s Teeth, and now his long-overlooked favorite, The Millennium.
Sinclair departed from his devoted socialist image just once. In 1934, he changed his political registration from Socialist to Democrat and gave up his typewriter for the soapbox, campaigning throughout California for the Democratic nomination for governor. His “End Poverty in California” (EPIC) campaign struck a chord with voters during the Great Depression, and he shocked the politicians by winning the nomination. After that it was all downhill. The Republicans and the media vilified Sinclair in what historians say was the dirtiest political campaign in California history until Richard Nixon’s shameless “Pink Lady” campaign to defeat Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950. Sinclair, denounced as an atheist, anarchist, bolshevist, puritan, and Social Fascist, lost his bid for governor to Republican candidate Frank Merriam.
Sinclair was not one to be defeated by political failure. There was always another social injustice to be fought, and he would eagerly take on the next cause. In 1933 he wrote I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future—a description of his EPIC program. Two years later, he wrote I, Candidate for Governor and How I Got Licked—an exposé of the dirty tricks and the influence of money used in politics.
Nonetheless, his political endeavor was one of the ten lifetime achievements he cited in the “Summing Up” section in his 1962 autobiography:
The endless hours of writing, the quixotic search for utopia, the rejection by publishers, and the ridicule from critics all took their toll on Sinclair. One criticism that caused him special grief was the accusation that he was a “parlor Socialist,” writing about poverty while living a wealthy life.
In 1917 he responded to one such critic in a letter titled “The Price I Paid,” published in Pearson’s Magazine in April. Sinclair charged that media reports that he was a “millionaire Socialist” were false, and claimed that writing exclusively in the cause of human welfare and justice had cost him dearly. Saying that he lived a fairly austere life, Sinclair pointed out that he had never owned an automobile and rode a second-hand bicycle for which he paid ten dollars. He said he could have been a millionaire if he had been willing to eliminate socialism from his words and actions. Instead, he “stood by the faith.”
While he would earn hundreds of thousands of dollars during his lifetime, he would always spend more than he earned, most of it on his “propaganda” for social justice. He also pointed out that he sacrificed practically all his standing and influence as a distinguished man of letters. Rather than being a much-respected member of the intellectual caste, he was often perceived as an agitator, protestor, or at best a literary gadfly. He complained about the Associated Press, “My name does not get upon its wires unless I am arrested, or divorce my wife, or do something else considered disgraceful.”
While The Millennium was partially designed to amuse, it was also meant to remind the reader that there were distinct social classes in the early twentieth century, with some people wallowing in unimaginable wealth and others suffering in unimaginable poverty. Nearly a century later, Upton Sinclair’s words are as relevant to our society as they were originally. Ironically, critics who deign to review this reprint of The Millennium may criticize and deride it with many of the same words their predecessors used in the early 1900s. Before Seven Stories Press agreed to reprint the novel, it was rejected by other publishers and literary agents for “not having literary value.”
Upton Sinclair concluded his final autobiography with an admonition to mankind, saying, “He can only say what he thinks and hope to be heard. He can only go on fighting for social justice and the democratic ideal, hope that man does not destroy himself, by design or by accident, and trust that eventually the peoples of the world will force their rulers to follow the ways of peace, of freedom, and of social justice.”
Few authors in American literary history have had the passion for social justice of Upton Sinclair. There are none who had the words to reach millions of people throughout the world with that passion.
Here is The Millennium: A Comedy of the Year 2000, a long-overlooked novel by Upton Sinclair, originally published in 1924, now making a timely appearance in 2000. The reader is cautioned not to be put off by the archaic spelling of some words or an occasional grammatical lapse. This edition of The Millennium is faithful to Upton Sinclair’s original version. Upton would want it that way.
[Note: While I consulted more than twenty-five books about Upton Sinclair, I found the following three most valuable in writing this introduction: Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1962); Upton Sinclair: American Rebel by Leon Harris (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1975); Upton Sinclair by William A. Bloodwort, Jr. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977).]