For all of the hopeful indications of the rising tide of progressivism, the American socialist movement ended the nineteenth century and began the twentieth at a critical juncture. The popular organizations that had espoused socialist and socialistic measures in the 1890s, especially the Nationalists and the Populists, had either lost their momentum or been coopted by the mainstream parties. The more militant parties, De Leon's Socialist Labor Party for example, had never gained anything like a national following. Into the breach stepped the Socialist Party, formed in 1901 when the splinters of several disintegrating, smaller Marxian parties determined to present a united front, adopted the parliamentary style of the Second Internationale, and found a charismatic, coalition-building leader in Eugene Debs.
In very many ways, Debs and the Socialist Party of America (SPA) picked up where the gradualist, non-Marxian socialists of the previous decade had left off. The path followed by Daniel De Leon, whereby early acquaintance and involvement in Nationalism was succeeded within a few years by a swing far into doctrinaire revolutionary Marxism, was not the norm among U.S. socialists. More typical was the progression of Debs. While in jail following the federal suppression of the Pullman strike of 1894, which he led as president of the American Railway Union, Debs professed that his turn into socialism was aided by Bellamy and Gronlund as well as the German Marxist Karl Kautsky.1 He considered himself a Populist after his imprisonment as well as before, and throughout his years as leader of the Socialist Party and perennial presidential contender, Debs exhibited tendencies toward popular inclusiveness and political expediency as well as antipathy toward capitalism, characteristics of the gradualist, predominantly non-Marxist socialism of the 1890s.
The legacy of 1890s socialism is clear as well in the early work of Upton Sinclair. Strongly reminiscent of Gilman's Populist peroration against violence is Upton Sinclair's 1904 piece published in the Appeal to Reason and addressed to Chicago stockyard workers: “You Have Lost the Strike! Now What Are You Going to Do About It?” Although a twenty-six-year-old socialist neophyte who had never himself worked at the stockyards or even yet visited them, Sinclair already knew by the light of socialist principles just how the workers would need to proceed and what they must avoid:
You think, perhaps, that I mean mobs and insurrections, dynamite and gatling guns. I do not.
I speak to Americans.
I speak to men whose ancestors did the fighting; whose fathers left them freedom as their birthright who handed down to them a weapon by which they might forever guard it for their own.
That weapon is the ballot.
THE BALLOT!2
Even as Sinclair synthesizes socialist militancy with Americanism, he makes clear, as Gilman had, that the violent methods of direct-actionists were not needed under American conditions.
Like Gilman and many other socialists coming of age around the turn of the century, Sinclair had also read and synthesized his Edward Bellamy. In the long dialogue on socialist theory that comprises most of the penultimate scene of The Jungle, the fictional dialectician Nicholas Schliemann seems to have drawn practically half of the details of the coming socialist society from Looking Backward. One of the key features of Bellamy's commonwealth, the sharp split between the regimentation of industrial life and the freedom of social life, can be found in one of Schliemann's most memorable and conceptually fundamental aphorisms: “Communism in material production, anarchism in intellectual.”3 Also like Bellamy, Schliemann envisages the possibility of much shorter terms of work for laborers, and much more productive industrial production, by eliminating the inefficiencies of overproduction in a competitive environment; and like Bellamy, he sees the “ultra-modern profession of advertising” as representing all that is wrong with industrial competition, wasting energy to persuade consumers to buy items they do not need, or otherwise to justify the existence of “ten thousand varieties of a thing for purposes of ostentation and snobbishness, where one variety would do for use.”4 Schliemann and Bellamy are further agreed on the basic principles for using production cost rather than market value in determining the prices of most goods and services.5
It would be a mistake, though, to flatten out entirely the difference between the socialist movement that caught Sinclair's imagination in 1904 and the Nationalist movement that inspired Gilman's devotion in 1890. The generational shift in personnel was accompanied by a broadening of the socialist movement's scope. The movement expanded leftward, so that groups such as the newly founded Industrial Workers of the World would be more difficult for Sinclair to dismiss than, say, the Socialist Labor Party had been for Gilman. (Indeed, once Sinclair spent more time in the movement, it would be more difficult for him even to reject “mobs and insurrections, dynamite and gatling guns” as he had initially.) The movement also expanded further into the mainstream, so that Socialist Party regulars began to focus upon the respectability of the party, and members of the major parties began to endorse political and social remedies that had previously been backed only by socialists and “muckrakers.” Although Gilman, as already noted, showed a surprising openness to a variety of militant (though not violent) philosophies, the diversity of American socialism between the turn of the century and the beginning of World War I was such that Sinclair, in trying to assimilate its breadth and intricacies, was led to attempt an almost Whitmanian synthesis of contraries, extending even to the anarchist “propaganda of the deed.” That he emerged with a functional socialist praxis at all—and with some definite results to show for his effort—is a testament to the dialectical work of socialism within U.S. culture as well as to Sinclair's own personal intellectual accomplishment.
BRAIN WORK AND THE REVOLUTION
“Meantime, in the realm of thought, his life was a perpetual adventure.”
For some critics of Sinclair, an account of the author's views on socialism is closely connected with the profession of authorship itself, particularly as conditioned by the higher social status of writers as compared to working-class people whom socialist writers purport to represent. In the 1930s, the distinguished critic and then-Communist fellow traveler Granville Hicks averred that Sinclair's novels are often told “from the point of view of the middle class convert to radicalism” and concludes that “he has never eradicated the effects of his bourgeois upbringing. Though his aim had been socialistic, his psychology has remained that of the liberal.”6 In what has remained for over thirty years the definitive description of Sinclair's creation of The Jungle, Michael Folsom also points to a bourgeois psychology. The novel's infamous ending seems to Folsom to reveal that Sinclair was interested most of all in his own fate as a professional writer: “Sinclair, who had spent a whole book immersed in the lives of laboring people, was ultimately most interested in the intelligentsia and its problems. A Socialist was, for him, someone who could make or write an argument.”7 Recent Sinclair biographer Kevin Mattson goes so far as to characterize the entire American Socialist Party as aligned with Sinclair's literary caste. “The Socialist Party that Sinclair would join was composed largely of lawyers, journalists, and teachers,” Mattson reports, making it a relatively genteel and timid organization, “derided” by “some who were more revolutionary” as “slowcialism.”8
Similar conclusions have been reached regarding the social status of authors and the particular brand of socialism espoused by Gilman and Du Bois, as well, and therefore it seems fitting to treat the issues together—and before proceeding very much further in my larger argument. Gilman's genteel roots and bourgeois upbringing are treated as an impediment, for example, by biographer Mary Hill. While Hill acknowledges the hardship Gilman faced during her childhood years, when her mother, abandoned by her husband, maintained her family by shuttling them between the households of a long succession of relatives—“forced to move,” the young Charlotte Perkins wrote, “nineteen times in eighteen years, fourteen of them from one city to another”—Hill steadfastly denies that these experiences in any way qualified Gilman for identification with the working class: “Though Charlotte had seen hard times, she was not working class.”9 Class status and political quiescence are, for Hill, indissolubly linked: “Like many people of her class and heritage, Charlotte had learned from thinkers more than activists, men who emphasized religion, science, and keen educational training as reformers' tools, not farm and labor meetings, strikes, or galvanizing fights.”10 Such a characterization of Gilman's politics has been extended to the socialist and socialistic groups with which Gilman affiliated. “In the spate of utopian novels inspired by Looking Backward,” Mark Pittenger notes, the “brain workers” who were to forge the new, egalitarian society and then administer it “were very often either scientists or engineers, and almost never proletarians.”11
The character of W. E. B. Du Bois's socialism has been imputed less from Du Bois's genteel but economically uncertain upbringing in a single-parent household than from the class status of his decidedly well-heeled associates on the board of the NAACP, some of whom were socialists and are widely credited with influencing Du Bois's brief stint with the party in 1911–12. Adolph Reed's W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought follows Manning Marable in suggesting that Du Bois's socialism was adopted from his peers on the NAACP board and that it was of a “conservative variety.” Wilson Jeremiah Moses's The Golden Age of Black Nationalism likewise specifies Du Bois's early editorship of The Crisis as “fall[ing] into the period when Du Bois toyed with the idea of non-revolutionary white-collar socialism” and cites his kinship with liberals, progressives, and moderate socialists including Jane Addams, Mary White Ovington, William English Walling, and Charles Edward Russell.12 Whatever may be said for or against the political and intellectual acumen of Du Bois, Sinclair, Gilman, and other socialist intellectuals, criticism of them can boil down to just this: they were of middle-class origin; their politics, therefore, cannot make any genuine claim to represent the working class.
Viewed as formal arguments, such a dismissal amounts to little more than an ad hominem derogation. If genuine socialist theory and praxis are necessarily dependent on a proletarian occupation or family of the theorist-practitioner, we would have to dismiss outright scores of socialist intellectuals including leading American socialists left, right, and center: Daniel De Leon, Victor Berger, Morris Hillquit (not to mention Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels).13 If, however, such applications of identity politics are overly simplistic, it is reasonable to observe that a person's standpoint, although it does not simply determine how that person thinks and acts, does affect how he or she thinks and acts—and particularly, speaks and acts in political terms.14 And so we should ask: To which class or classes did Sinclair, Gilman, and Du Bois belong? What bearing did their class position have upon their politics? And what do their cases tell us more generally about the supposedly bourgeois origins and self-serving intentions of the socialist groups in which they participated?
For all three writers, though in slightly different ways, answers to the question of class status prove to be far less straightforward than the simple label of “bourgeois” or “middle class” would designate. As Sinclair recounts in his autobiography, during his childhood years there was enough contact with better-heeled relations that Sinclair could occasionally sleep under “silken coverlets in a fashionable home” and his family could seek and gain some respite during economic emergencies. In weeks when his improvident and alcoholic father was unable to pay the rent, Sinclair records that “my mother paid a visit to her father, the railroad official.”15 Refuge with relatives did little to alleviate the specific sufferings of downward mobility, however. Sinclair's largely autobiographical Love's Pilgrimage recounts that “Thyrsis,” the male protagonist, and his parents “always paid what they owed; but they were not always able to pay it when they owed it, and they suffered all the agonies and humiliations of those who did not pay all. . . . There was endless wrangling and strife and worry over money; and every year the task was harder, the standards lower, the case more hopeless.”16
Sinclair's teenage years were a period of relative upward mobility. He largely supported himself—and at times his mother—first by writing children's stories and jokes for periodicals and later by penning serialized military adventure stories.17 He did this even while attending high school, two years of college at the City College of New York, and then more college and graduate school at Columbia University.18 But education brought Sinclair a keener appreciation for classic literature, which contributed to his ambition to produce “a serious novel,” so that the achievement of a higher level of education led him—paradoxically—back to the brink of poverty. Sinclair recalls: “When, at the age of twenty-one, I became obsessed with the desire to write a serious novel, I came to loathe this hackwork, and from that time after I was never able to do it with success, even though, driven by desperate need, I several times made the effort.”19 Complicating Sinclair's writing ambition further was his marriage to Meta Fuller in 1901 and the birth of their son, David, in 1902. This complication, too, was generated by various ideological prescriptions: chiefly, the bourgeois expectation that the nuclear family should be supported by the man of the household. Although Sinclair might have fallen back on the support of Meta's fairly prosperous family, Up-ton, Meta, and David instead lived in the most bohemian of economic circumstances, living as squatters in rural areas, sleeping and working in tents or shacks. While Upton was writing The Jungle, for instance, the Sinclairs lived in conditions of physical privation severe enough to qualify as an experiential correlative for the desperation of the packing-town immigrants, as he suggested in his autobiography: “Did I wish to know how the poor suffered in wintertime in Chicago? I had only to recall the previous winter in the cabin, when we had only cotton blankets, and had put rugs on top of us, and cowered shivering in our separate beds.”20
The parallel suggested by Sinclair is an approximate one, for whereas the Rudkus family has their hardship dictated by a series of heavily determined circumstances (their capability only for unskilled manual labor, their ignorance of American customs and laws, and above all the meagerness of the total resources of their extended family), the Upton Sinclair family at least appears to have had some choices open to them. The separation between working-class and bourgeois was by no means absolute, however. Sinclair's authorial profession exposed Sinclair and his family to the vicissitudes of the capitalist marketplace in particularly naked fashion. At the very outset of Sinclair's career, the kind of literary work that held the clearest promise for making a living was the most proletarianized. The anonymous jokes and the military stories written under pseudonyms meant an almost complete appropriation of his intellectual labor, and to earn little more than twenty dollars a month he had to produce as many as thirty thousand words a week.21 Sinclair knew from his early experience as a hack writer what it must be like to be a Jurgis Rudkus, at first capable of any kind of Herculean task, but within a year or two beaten physically and mentally and unable to keep pace. When, subsequently, Sinclair aspired to produce literature of a higher caliber—when he sought to move from the equivalent of the literary proletariat to the more bourgeois reaches of the profession—he traded the hope of social gain and an ideological wage for almost absolute financial uncertainty. If, in some measure, the uncertainty and privations were chosen, they were choices scripted within a set of ideological and social expectations that maintained the boundaries of class divisions under capitalism. The arbitrariness of the choice and the boundaries might make the bourgeois subject all the more inclined to follow the expectations fastidiously, but that arbitrariness also affords a certain knowledge and an impetus to rebel—to call out the merely meretricious distinctions by which social and economic inequality is organized. In short, the instability of the writer's petit bourgeois class standing might make the writer particularly jealous of minor privileges, or it might constitute the essential basis for alliance with the working classes. Here, then, was another, specifically political dimension of choice available to some among the bourgeois.
We may offer a very similar portrait of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's class standing and its social and political implications, with the principal variations having to do with the ways gender difference shaped Gilman's professional experience and political attitudes. Whereas Sinclair's father was improvident, Gilman's father altogether abandoned his family. Her mother was able to provide for herself and her children primarily by casting the family upon the charity of variously hospitable relatives, an arrangement that led to Charlotte Perkins's nineteen relocations before reaching adulthood. During the ten years of her marriage to Walter Stetson, Charlotte experienced somewhat greater domestic stability, but at the price of nearly absolute female dependency upon the male breadwinner and, after the birth of her daughter Katharine, the enforced period of retirement from mental work prescribed by her physicians, which resulted in the near total breakdown described in “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”
In the formative period of Gilman's development as an author and political thinker, between her 1889 separation from Walter and her 1900 marriage to her second husband, George Houghton Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman never earned a middle-class wage and, in spite of some unmistakable bourgeois pretensions, never lived in a securely bourgeois household. A passage from one of her class talks written late in 1892, “Our Domestic Duties,” represents a problematic class bias in her writing, when she speaks with condescension of manual laborers: “Putting east and west together the ‘maid of all work' does not get more than 4.50 a week. That makes $8.00 a week [when room and board are added]. If you want to stretch that and call it 9—even if it were ten—ten dollars for 7 days work is but a dollar and a half a day. And that is what we pay to the common laborer, the hod carrier, the digger and lifter and breaker of stones.”22 But the passage also reveals a working-class wage scale that Gilman herself was seldom able to match. At the end of a good month over a year later, January 1893, Gilman by the evidence of her diary was earning no more than they: “Have done about fifteen pieces of salable work this month—three lectures, three poems, nine articles of one sort or another. Received $40.00 therefor so far. Fair work for an overworked invalid.”23 Such examples of Gilman's meager earnings can be multiplied many times over from the evidence of her Diaries. Month after month her income failed to meet her expenses, and she and her household survived by cash gifts from friends and family, a long succession of loans, and a string of vacated leases and disgruntled landlords. The situation only improved marginally when, after her divorce from Walter was finalized in 1894, she sent her daughter east to live with him and his new wife, and she took to the national lecture circuit. “I was many times entirely out of money,” and “My margin was always narrow,” she recalls.24
Gilman's class position, like Sinclair's, emerges as far more complex than just “bourgeois” or “proletarian.” For much of their early lives, they inhabited the ambiguous space between class designations, embodying that conundrum of class definition aptly described by Raymond Williams, in which they perceived their social position as middle class, “conscious of relative social position and thus of social distinction,” while at the same time they experienced an economic situation no more elevated than an unskilled, manual laborer, as both “sell and are dependent on their labour.”25 Rather than critiquing the idea of “class consciousness” from an assured middle-class standing, Gilman, in the 1890s at least, is critiquing it from the standpoint of someone between classes—whose rejection of middle- and working-class definitions is based precisely on her experience of straddling them.26 Moreover, Gilman's and Sinclair's financial hardship during their childhood and a decade or more of their adult lives raises questions about the middle-class standing of other leaders in the socialist movement, the “brain workers” who Pittenger supposes form a separate class with interests distinct from wage laborers. What we commonly imagine as the greater security of white-collar labor—the salaried job with benefits—was simply not the experience of Gilman, Sinclair, or their peers. If, for the sake of argument, we accept the premise that Gilman's and Sinclair's class standing was in fact middle class, this raises questions about what precisely we should mean by the term as applied to people living one hundred years ago. It is virtually a truism of American labor history that workers, especially skilled ones, were relatively conservative because they could hope to earn virtually the same income as their petit bourgeois counterparts.27 The corollary, however, is seldom considered: that these “bourgeois” with little economic clout and less security might make common cause with workers of similar means, and that the lives of neither group were comfortable enough for them not to want better than that permitted under market capitalism.
W. E. B. Du Bois makes the third triptych writer who grew up in a household in which the mother was the breadwinner and the father either improvident or altogether absent. Willie's mother, Mary, from the downwardly mobile but respectable Burghardt clan of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, gambled on marriage with the well-mannered, Haitian-born, and light-complexioned Alfred Du Bois. Within two years of “Willie” Du Bois's birth, she had lost the wager; Alfred moved on and out of Great Barrington, and neither mother nor son saw him again. As with the childhood situations of Sinclair and Gilman, the father's dereliction was countered by some basic sustenance provided by Mary's extended family, which was supplemented by her taking on domestic work. When Mary was partially crippled by a stroke, other townspeople in Great Barrington pitched in as well, and the network of social support worked just well enough that in adulthood Du Bois could recall “no poverty” in his childhood, though he recognized as well that “our family was certainly poor.”28 Du Bois's intellectual aptitude and scholarly achievement provided a way out of poverty and into contact with a world of privilege, but as a young adult he was always dependent upon wherever the current scholarship or present job opportunity led him. Although he was the first African American to win the Ph.D. from Harvard University, he was denied the still higher honor of being the first to earn the Ph.D. from the University of Berlin because renewal of his U.S. scholarship was capriciously denied just one semester short of the completion of his program.29
As for the influence of the socialists on the board of the NAACP, it should be mentioned at the outset that the wealth of the board members did not stipulate any particular place on the party's ideological spectrum: John Haynes Holmes, a sometime guest editor on The Crisis, was a Social Gospeler; William English Walling, sponsor of the motion to give Du Bois responsibilities as the association's director of research, was a radical, a sympathetic witness to the failed 1905 revolution in Russia; Charles Edward Russell was on the conservative wing of the socialist movement; Mary White Ovington, probably Du Bois's closest confidante on the board, was in the social democratic mainstream.30 The question of Du Bois's class status around the time he became a socialist has as much to do with Du Bois's professional roles—as editor of The Crisis and director of NAACP research—in relationship to the board as a whole. As the one African American on the NAACP's founding board and the second-best-known person of color in the United States—behind only Booker T. Washington—editor Du Bois was the single indispensable individual at the association's founding.31 But even while Du Bois's prestige in the black community ought to have made him first among equals on the NAACP board, his prerogatives as Crisis editor were hedged by the official oversight that the board exercised over the journal and the fact that Du Bois, unlike every other member of the board, was not independently wealthy. Oswald Garrison Villard, one of the most powerful board members and one of those most hostile to socialism, was also the landlord of The Crisis, whose offices were provided rent-free in the same Manhattan building that housed the Villard-owned Nation and New York Evening Post.32
Like Sinclair, and unlike most blue-collar and many white-collar workers, Du Bois had the privilege of a certain choice in his profession at the time of his first affiliation with the Socialist Party. Truly, in 1910 he stood at the brink of a decision that would define the trajectory of most of the rest of his professional life: he could continue his career of teaching and research at Atlanta University, or he could decide, as he did, to come to New York and become editor of The Crisis. What in his situation Du Bois could not choose, however, was to cut his ties with white, capitalist philanthropy, for Atlanta University and his Carnegie-endowed studies in Negro life were just as dependent upon it as were the NAACP and The Crisis. When the Slater Fund had refused to renew his scholarship for the critical final semester at the University of Berlin, Du Bois had seen how uncertain the support of such philanthropy could be. Repeatedly in the coming years Du Bois would clash with the NAACP board over association policy, including the basic question of whether The Crisis would function as an independent journal at Du Bois's discretion or as an organ of the association with editorial control directly vested in the board. From the outset, he knew that he served at the pleasure of his colleagues on the NAACP's directors; editor Du Bois always remained in essence an employee of the association.
That certain of Du Bois's philosophies and tastes had elitist implications is hardly surprising, given the kinds of personal and ideological pressures that were brought to bear through his world-class education and well-heeled company on the NAACP board. Yet the hybrid mix of Du Bois's background and experience—birth and childhood just above the poverty line, diligent and politic effort to make his way in the world, contact with the rich and powerful in adulthood—afforded him an uncommon range of choice in how he employed his own intellectual gifts and attainments. Contact with the lowly and the high-born gave him, much as with Gilman and Sinclair, the experiential capacity for understanding the situation of the poor and working class as well as a position of cultural and intellectual leverage that could be employed to change that situation. Even as Du Bois celebrated black America's Talented Tenth, he preached the necessity for that tenth to bring up with them, as they rose, the other nine-tenths of black America. Whereas, in helping to found the NAACP, Du Bois presumably supported the association's avowed goal of racial integration—by one interpretation, the means by which the most socially and economically advanced blacks might join their proper class without the stigma of race—the Crisis editor rapidly came to champion a quite different ideal, racial solidarity, which continually worked to break down class differences within black communities.
For all three triptych writers, the operative issue was not what their social class was, but what they did with and through their class position. The general answer as to what they did with their class position is fairly straightforward, if incomplete: they became socialists. Although to be a socialist around the turn of the century might mean a number of different things—a point that I will take up in the next section, with a closer consideration of what it meant for Upton Sinclair at the time he joined the party—it can also be said that to join the socialist movement, to recruit others to join that movement, and to advocate socialist solutions to social problems did mean, even for the most conservative of socialists, a greater equality in the distribution of the common wealth, resulting immediately in the diminution of class distinction and tending ultimately to the elimination of class difference altogether.
The critical issue is not the class status of intellectuals or of socialist intellectuals, but the question of how to make intellectuals socialist—or, for that matter, how to make any and all citizens socialist. Sinclair's work particularly highlights this issue. He was not as concerned with what kind of socialists “brain workers” would be, as he was concerned with how to do the brain work necessary for all workers, whether of head or hand, to become socialists. In the baldest terms, we may say that the transformation of a proletarian—or for that matter, a pastor, millionaire, or writer—into a socialist requires intellectual work. On this issue, Sinclair's position squares with the clear evidence of socialist party-building in the United States as elsewhere: namely, that even as not all, or even a majority of, exploited workers like Jurgis Rudkus became socialists, not all bourgeois intellectuals or, for that matter, wealthy industrialists rejected the moral summons of socialism. Regardless of occupation or class, nobody became a socialist by the mere pressure of economic and social determinants. The groundwork for socialism might well have been laid by such factors. Nonetheless, to recognize their social and economic circumstances as exploitation and to recognize their power to change those circumstances, individual workers and citizens had to become educated.
The point is repeatedly evident, for instance, in the process by which Jurgis becomes a socialist in Sinclair's The Jungle. The polemical and didactic passages toward the ending of the novel, which seem to lend substance to Folsom's and other critics' claims that Sinclair's socialism is for intellectuals only, are in fact the very passages that illustrate the means by which a regular proletarian, Jurgis, gains an intellectual mastery of his social circumstances and of their remedy through socialist transformation. They are also the means by which Sinclair, however cumbersomely, ensured that the novel would introduce its readership of various classes to the core principles of socialism. Immediately after the speech in which Jurgis is first acquainted with socialism, he is handed over to one of the party's organizers, a Polish tailor named Comrade Ostrinski who can explain socialism to Jurgis in his own language. Thereafter, while in the current order of things he remains a menial laborer, his mind grows: “he was just a hotel-porter, and expected to remain one while he lived,” but “in the realm of thought, his life was a perpetual adventure. There was so much to know—so many wonders to be discovered!”33
The Jungle does not in any way suggest that Jurgis, the former stockyard worker and current hotel service worker, occupies the same role within the socialist movement as the party intellectuals and itinerant party organizers. The novel pointedly shows, however, that their roles are not mutually exclusive. In the closing scene of The Jungle, in which the election results of 1904 are reported before a Socialist meeting in Chicago, the roles of intellectual and rank-and-file are portrayed as complementary to one another. The oratory of the speaker helps his hearers to envision the actions of individual voters as a coherent mass movement: “as he swung his long arms and beat up the crowd, to Jurgis he seemed the very spirit of the revolution.”34 But it is the casting of Socialist votes by the rank-and-file that constitutes the fundamental political act, and each voter must in turn take up the task of party building and political education: “It rests with you to take your resolution—now, in the flush of victory, to find these men who have voted for us, and bring them to our meetings, and organize them and bind them to us!”35 Hence intellectual development along the lines of class analysis is fundamental to the socialist identity of a proletarian such as Jurgis Rudkus, just as it is necessary for intellectuals like Sinclair, Gilman, and Du Bois to become socialists.
For Gilman and Du Bois, it must be said, there could not be quite the same steady flow in the circuit between intellectual leadership and mass action, moving from political education to revolutionary voting behavior and onward to further education and the creation of a widening circle of socialists voting and organizing according to their convictions. In short, Gilman and Du Bois belonged to groups whose suffrage was altogether forbidden or severely restricted and whose citizenship rights were limited in other ways as well. For them and other knowledge workers disenfranchised by gender, race, or other factors, the bond between the knowledge worker and others from their group could only be strengthened. For Sinclair and other white male socialists in the United States, the very smoothness of the circuit between leadership and mass action could leave them indifferent to the rights of less visible and less powerful women and minorities. The potential for gaps within radical political groups, then, is not only a matter of brain workers being separated by experience and perspective from rank-and-file manual laborers but also of an entire, potentially vanguard class—say, white proletarians—finding that their experience and perspective may separate them from others still less socially privileged. All of this complicates, rather than resolves, the difficulty socialists including Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois faced in welding together disparate groups of American citizens and half-citizens, proletarian, bourgeois, and even propertied classes into a working social democratic coalition. But these difficulties also challenge any assumption that the brain worker is unfitted for participation in the class struggle, if only because they underscore the necessity of the best kind of intellectual work, regardless of the current occupation of the intellectual worker, to formulate their solution.
THE DIVERSITY OF AMERICAN SOCIALISM, CIRCA 1906
“Communism in material production, anarchism in intellectual.”
As it happened, there was no shortage of ideas among American socialists. The election of 1904 described in the closing pages of The Jungle marked the beginning of what has been called the “golden age” of the socialist movement in America, a period lasting until the beginning of the Great War in which the party made steady gains in the popular vote, placed a representative in the U.S. Congress, elected mayors in Milwaukee, Schenectady, and over fifty other municipalities, and gained majorities on the councils of many of these cities.36 It was also a period of remarkable diversity in the socialist movement. One commentator notes that “the Party was far from homogeneous or orthodox in the present sense of that word, although before 1920 such differences were generally accepted as normal and desirable aspects of the process of developing a viable mass party.”37 And this is considering only the Socialist Party proper. The American socialist movement also included, further to the left, a persistent cadre of anarchists and a steadily growing anarcho-syndicalist union, the Industrial Workers of the World. On the right, there were significant numbers of adherents to the Social Gospel, and socialist ideas were manifest, perhaps unsystematically but nonetheless tangibly, among the Progressives of both major parties. Most of these varieties of socialist activity are evident in Upton Sinclair's writing and activism beginning with The Jungle and continuing through his campaign on behalf of the victims of the Ludlow Massacre. Broad as his sympathies and intellectual curiosity were, Sinclair developed in his work a compelling case that the various forms of socialism did, in fact, work effectively together—even when the various factions might sincerely distrust each other.
Something of the diversity of the socialist movement is apparent among Sinclair's initial mentors in the movement. As with Du Bois's early socialist mentors, it would at first seem that the considerable power of these individuals would produce some homogeneity in their socialist perspectives. But there is virtually no consistency at all in their socialist views and affiliations. Leonard Abbott, described in Love's Pilgrimage as the first person to give “Thyrsis” socialist literature to read, was an editor at the Literary Digest, director of the Free Speech League, and principal of New York's Ferrer School (named after the martyred Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer). George Herron, also mentioned prominently in Love's Pilgrimage, was well known in the Social Gospel movement—and somewhat notorious—at the time Sinclair met him. His extramarital relationship with the wealthy socialite Carrie Rand had led to a highly public divorce, his resignation from church ministry, and marriage to Rand, who subsequently used her inheritance to endow the Rand School for Social Research. J. A. Wayland, the initial publisher of The Jungle, earned a fortune from land speculation in the West, was the founding editor of The Coming Nation (1893–95) as well as its immediate successor, the Appeal, and thus provides a tangible link between Nationalism and Populism and the era of the Socialist Party.38 Gaylord Wilshire was a real estate magnate from Southern California whose self-named magazine (Wilshire's) was a frequent publisher of Sinclair's earliest socialist articles. Presented as “a drawing-room edition of Mephistopheles” in Love's Pilgrimage, Wilshire was an advocate of syndicalism and, for that advocacy, was forced to move his magazine first to Canada and then to England in order to evade government censorship of his publications.39
The diversity of American socialism is practically flaunted in the closing pages of The Jungle, the infamously didactic monologues and dialogues upon socialist theory and praxis. Once apologizing for the rambling and expository style of these chapters, Sinclair confessed, “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.”40 This very effort at comprehensiveness and didacticism, however, is a boon to our effort to describe American socialism near the beginning of its ascent into political prominence. To begin with, socialist variety is on display in Sinclair's cast of characters, both fictional and nonfictional. Comrade Ostrinski, Jurgis's tutor, presents the party-building and electoral strategies that were the main line pursued by the Socialist Party of America throughout its major period, 1901–20. As we have seen, the electoral strategy is subsequently dramatized in the closing, election-day scene as well. But Sinclair's interest in socialist leaders and philosophies ranges far and wide, as indicated by his brief character sketches of real-life socialists whom he generally does not name but describes with enough detail for readers to identify. There is Eugene Debs, of course, who is identified as one of the “two standard-bearers of the party” whom Jurgis hears during the 1904 election season, and described as “a man of electric presence, tall and gaunt, with a face worn thin by struggle and suffering.”41 Besides pointed allusions to the radical publishers Wayland and Wilshire, noted above, characters that suggest the leftward extension of the socialist movement include Jack London, described as someone “who had tramped the country and been sent to jail, had lived in the Whitechapel slums, and been to the Klondike in search of gold,” and Daniel De Leon, readily recognizable to socialist readers in the figure of the “Little Giant” who Sinclair says had “written a veritable encyclopedia upon the subject [of capitalism], a book that was nearly as big as himself.”42 To broaden the socialist spectrum still further, Sinclair elsewhere includes reference to “Mrs. Gilman”—Charlotte Perkins Gilman, of course—as the author of books on women's economics and domestic cooperatives.43
The Jungle portrays the polyglot nature of the socialist movement most fully, perhaps, through the fictional comrades Schliemann and Lucas, the contrasting characters who generate the long dialogue in the novel's penultimate scene. Several critics have attempted to establish definitively Sinclair's factional preference within the socialist movement by discerning which of these characters the narrative seems to favor. The effort appears to be more daunting than it might first seem, however, because for every critic (Michael Folsom, Isabel Díaz) who is certain that Sinclair prefers Lucas, there is another critic (Scott Derrick, June Jacobs) who presents irrefutable evidence that Schliemann is the favorite.44 The upshot of this critical stalemate, I would maintain, is that Sinclair's narrator succeeds in being largely sympathetic to both of these socialists, no small feat given how different their philosophies are. Whereas Schliemann is positively contemptuous of Christianity, describing it as “the Arch-fiend's deadliest weapon,” which “oppressed [the wage slave's] mind, and poisoned the stream of progress at its source,” Lucas the Social Gospeler sees the Christian Bible as “one long cry of the human spirit for deliverance from the sway of oppression” and Jesus as “the world's first revolutionist, the true founder of the Socialist movement”; Lucas also stresses the pragmatic advantage of being able to appeal to the social conscience of the many people who call themselves Christian. Schliemann accepts the notion of Jesus as “revolutionist” only insofar as it permits him to put in a good word for revolutionary violence, as he characterizes Jesus as “a practical man”—someone who “would take pretty little imitation-lemons, such as are now being shipped into Russia, handy for carrying in the pockets, and strong enough to blow a whole temple out of sight.'”45 While Lucas provides the argument for moral suasion and the capture of existing institutions, Schliemann provides one for direct action and—at least under certain circumstances—violence against those institutions.
Notably, neither of these major spokesmen for socialism is typical of the Socialist Party line. Both are introduced as “Socialists.” But as a Christian minister advocating the Social Gospel, Lucas would not be typical of the party with its resolutely secular ideology. And Schliemann should not, in point of fact, be a member of the party, although it is conceivable that he might be “one of the minds of the movement” without being a card-carrying party member.46 Schliemann openly declares himself to be a “philosophic anarchist,” a point of view evident also from his convictions that “socialism was simply a necessary step toward a far-distant goal, a step to be tolerated with impatience,” that “the end of human existence was the free development of every personality, unrestricted by laws save those of its own being,” and that presently, with the abolishment of the profit system and of state authority, “Society would break up into independent, self-governing communities of mutually congenial persons.”47 For holding such views openly—as well as sympathizing with the Russian direct-actionists—Schliemann ought to have been among the anarchists barred from the party from its inception.
Moreover, in offering Schliemann as the representative of anarchism, Sinclair puts a far more congenial face on anarchism than might have been expected—indeed, a far more positive face than Sinclair appears to have originally intended in his design for the novel. Recall that Sinclair's 1904 Appeal to Reason article, “You Have Lost the Strike! Now What Are You Going to Do About It?” had drawn a bright line between the methods of democratic socialism and those of the anarchists and other violent revolutionaries. Much the same attitude was reflected in Sinclair's précis of the novel providing advance advertising for its serial publication in Appeal to Reason: “Then the hero goes out and hears about anarchism. Anarchists and the social crime and terror that make them have not yet been put into fiction. The hero is making bombs—and then he learns about Socialism.”48 The ending that Sinclair actually wrote shifts his representation of the typical anarchist from something close to the popular stereotype, a bomb-hurling madman, to a portrait of a far-seeing and erudite social philosopher. Moreover, Schliemann's quip about Christ the practical revolutionist makes Schliemann a supporter of revolutionary violence not merely in the abstract but in relation to a historical event: the Bolshevik Party's failed coup against the czar in 1905. Not only does the novel's dominant theorist endorse revolutionary violence before the fact, when knowing support means collaboration, but the novel's narrative point of view also condones the violence and its foreknowledge after the fact, when Sinclair might have wished to distance this character (and himself) from the revolution, given both its violence and its failure.
That Sinclair was aware of tensions within the party stemming from its diversity is clear enough from the minimal common ground that the novel describes as binding the socialist movement together. There appear to be just three planks that might be agreed upon as a shared socialist platform. The first is the principle of “no compromise” articulated by Comrade Ostrinski and reinforced by the election-day speaker, which seems to allow for a variety of means to socialist ends (including especially parliamentarianism) so long as all socialist parties remain united in their opposition to capitalism. The second and third are the “two carefully worded propositions” upon which the sparring debaters Lucas and Schliemann can agree. One is a statement of the socialist goal broad enough to include state socialism as well Schliemann's favored communes: “common ownership and democratic management of the means of producing the necessities of life.” Another articulates with slightly more detail the means to this end, “the class-conscious political organization of the wage-earners.”49 It is an articulation that shows some influence of Marxism upon Sinclair and the post-1900 socialist movement, although by using the term “wage-earners” instead of the “proletariat” Sinclair offers a formulation broad enough to accommodate the full range of pre-1900 producerist thinkers and to include, with minimal friction, brain-laboring, piecework writers such as himself and Gilman, and even the salaried but very much supervised editor Du Bois.
For the most part, though, The Jungle envisages the tensions as productive. Implicitly as well as explicitly, The Jungle is all about inclusiveness, about entertaining all kinds of socialist philosophy and praxis and about contemplating the possibility that most of them would, in the end, be compatible with the aim of progress toward social democracy. Not only does Schliemann remain cordial toward Lucas in their spirited debate, but the very representation of Schliemann embraces contraries that Sinclair appears to have believed were in no way incompatible. Although Schliemann is a character at least as radical as De Leon, we have already noted some of the ways in which his utopian vision is heavily cribbed from that of Edward Bellamy, supposed to be among the most conservative of American socialists. Such a synthesis might seem implausible. The fact that Schliemann is definitely identified as a capital-S Socialist, when in fact the party refused to recognize anarchists, may well suggest something is amiss with his characterization. Yet even as Sinclair was writing The Jungle, another set of incidents was beginning to unfold that exhibited for Sinclair the productive interactions possible along the radical-to-progressive spectrum.
The Haywood-Moyer case was a narrative he had hoped to include in the novel as one of the many things he had “thought my readers ought to know.” In December 1905, during a strike of the Western Federation of Miners, the union leaders Charles Moyer, William Haywood, and George Pettibone were abducted by agents of the governors of Colorado and Idaho, carried away to Idaho on a special train that abrogated extradition procedures, and made to stand trial for conspiracy to commit murder. The murder victim, the former governor of Idaho, had been killed by a bomb while Moyer, Haywood, and Pettibone were in Colorado, but such facts were apparently not supposed to stand in the way of retribution against radical labor leaders. In response, the labor and socialist movements swiftly mobilized. Eugene Debs proclaimed in the Appeal to Reason: “If they attempt to murder Moyer, Haywood and their brothers, a million revolutionists, at least, will meet them with guns.”50
Appeal editor Fred Warren devised a publicity stunt that demonstrated the partial nature of American justice as applied to the radical labor movement. Warren wondered, editorially, what would happen if some other prominent but respectable public figure were wanted for murder, had fled to another state, and was kidnaped so that he could stand trial. What if that person were a state governor? Warren had in mind the former governor of Kentucky, William Taylor, who had murdered his Democratic gubernatorial opponent and taken refuge in Indiana, where a fellow Republican governor refused to extradite him. Accordingly, the Appeal announced a $1,000 bounty to kidnap Taylor and return him to Kentucky to face murder charges. It was purely a publicity maneuver, Warren explained; the state of Kentucky had already announced a bounty ten times greater, and the governor of Indiana had made plain all along that he would continue to harbor his fellow Republican. Indeed, the present governor of Kentucky (again a Republican) proceeded to pardon Taylor of a crime for which he had been indicted but never tried. Later, in 1909, government prosecutors bolstered Fred Warren's case about the prejudices of the capitalist judiciary, as the then-pardoned former governor Taylor testified against Warren in a libel suit that resulted in Warren's conviction, a sentence of six months, and a fine of $1,500.
As framed by the contemporary historian of the Appeal, the lesson of the fight to save Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone and subsequently, too, of the fight to free Warren, was all about the class war: “The revolutionary little sheet and its fighting editor emerged with colors flying, while the routed forces of Capital fled in confusion and dismay.”51 Yet even as the cases against Haywood, Pettibone, and Moyer, and against Warren showed clearly the lengths to which capital would go to protect its interests, the “capitalist” courts did ultimately acquit Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone of all charges, as the juries did not fail to overlook the defendants' iron-clad alibis. Sinclair also could not miss the fact that Warren's campaign, ultimately highly successful as an anticapitalist protest, had been carried on not in the streets but in the public (and more or less free) press. Sinclair's own public activities in the case had included organizing an eminently respectable protest meeting at Carnegie Hall to demand that President Taft pardon Fred Warren, to be led by a blue-chip list of socialists and progressives: Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Lincoln Steffens, muckraking journalist and author of The Shame of the City; Edwin Markham, the protest poet of “The Man with the Hoe”; civil rights lawyer Samuel Untermyer; and Clarence Darrow, the renowned criminal defense lawyer then representing Warren on appeal.52
A relatively swift outcome of the Warren case likewise served to reinforce the value of working within as well as confronting the existing system. Prior to Sinclair's scheduled meeting at Carnegie Hall—and long before armed revolutionaries had arrived in Washington—Fred Warren received a presidential pardon. On February 4, 1911, journalist Frederick Upham Adams confided to Sinclair the details of the behind-the-scenes denouement. The pardon had been won by a series of conventional political maneuvers: the intervention of Warren's congressional representative; the influence of “the new Solicitor General, a personal friend of mine and of our line of social economics”; and Adams's own presentation of the facts of the Warren case in an article delivered to President Taft. In his letter to Sinclair, Adams saw reason to hope that both socialists and “mere” authors might exert influence at the highest levels of government: “So far as I am aware this is the first instance in which a mere author has forced an overthrow of a verdict affirmed by a Court of Appeals, and it is the first instance, to my knowledge, in which an executive of any nation has exercised clemency on behalf of a Socialist.”53
At the same time, Sinclair reckoned that the left-wing threat was almost as important as the right-wing rapprochement. Debs's threat, and militant workers to back it up, made Adams's behind-the-scenes dealing possible. Hence, during the golden age of the Socialist Party, Sinclair interested himself less in sectarian party-building activities than with exploratory dialogue with syndicalism and that still more radical version of “direct action” defended by his fictional character Schliemann—anarchism. Both The Jungle and Sinclair's immediately subsequent nonfiction work, The Industrial Republic (1908), cited the Russian anarchist Petr Kropotkin, whose Fields, Factories, and Workshops was taken as the leading authority on the productivity of modern agricultural methods.54 During a stay in England in 1912, Sinclair opened a correspondence with Kropotkin. Soon he arranged a meeting with Kropotkin as well, who was living in exile in England at the time. Years later, Sinclair continued to describe Kropotkin as one of the leading men of international socialism: “I went to see him in Brighton England; he kissed me on both cheeks and I can still feel his bushy whiskers. One of the noblest of men!”55
Sinclair was then on his way home from receiving a no-fault divorce in the Netherlands, his marriage to Meta Fuller having disintegrated (a topic to be covered in detail next chapter). He—along with the woman who would soon become his second wife, Mary Craig Kimbrough—stayed in England for several weeks with his early socialist mentor Gaylord Wilshire and his wife, Mary. But it was not love alone that was in the English air in 1912. While in England, Sinclair also collaborated politically and professionally with Gaylord, who had landed there along with his syndicalist magazine in flight from censorship threats first in the United States and then in Canada. At the time Wilshire was also filling in as editor at an English magazine, The Syndicalist, whose erstwhile editor had been imprisoned for his actions during the British rail transportation strike of 1911–12. Sinclair helped with the editing of both magazines, taking positions straddling the division between the IWW and the Socialist Party.56 In a debate between himself and Wilshire published in the October 1913 Wilshire's, “A Butterfly Net for a Rhinoceros Hunt,” Sinclair sought alternately to placate and to provoke: “I grant you that the workers will never win by politics alone. The masters would take away the vote just as quickly as they would the right to strike. But why not fight with both sword AND shield? . . . I want to get you to discuss this question . . . that of both political and industrial action, carried on, each in its proper time, and each supplementing the other—each protecting the other.”57 Whereas Sinclair defends the value of political action and hence of the Socialist Party, he concedes a number of points made by Wilshire, who maintained that the economic power wielded by the workers, because relatively independent of anything the capitalists might decree, was less vulnerable than their voting rights.
On her own 1896 visit to England, Charlotte Perkins Gilman had found herself similarly impressed by the anarchists whose credentials had been denied by the international socialist congress. On her return to the United States, she had touted anarchism as the Russian equivalent of U.S. Populism. Gilman, though, had focused her energies on building up the U.S. version of the Fabian Society. Back home in the United States in 1913, Sinclair threw himself into further direct collaboration with syndicalists and anarchists. He was a participant in the Paterson textile strike and workers' pageant of that year, as he organized a picket of Fifth Avenue shops by silkworkers in the days leading up to the pageant at Madison Square Garden.58 Rose Pastor Stokes, an IWW leader and one of the principal organizers of the pageant, responded enthusiastically to Sinclair's plans for the picket: “A group of women pickets in front of Fifth Avenue shops, bearing really striking legends, to thrust in the faces of the indifferent ladies who wear the silks they make, would create something of a stir—and more—in the press. Of course some of the women would get arrested, but it would have to be the silk workers themselves who are to carry these banners—and they are used to arrest.”59 Although the pageant itself was one of the great publicity successes in the history of political theater and political art, in practical terms the Paterson labor action ended in failure; the strike was broken and the IWW's effectiveness brought into question.60 Sinclair's assessment of the failure of the Paterson strike, included in his debate with Wilshire, criticized the SPA as well as the IWW. Sinclair credited rank-and-file members of the New York party with cooperating with the Paterson IWW during the strike, and he criticized the IWW for undermining the party's efforts to fight the New York and New Jersey authorities politically. But his argument also conceded the syndicalists' major premise: “The politicians in the Socialist Party [must] come to understand that the working classes care nothing about old age pensions (or, at any rate, ought not to), but that the purpose of a Revolutionary party is to back up the Revolutionary unions while they reorganise the industries.”61
Whether in the negative example of the Paterson strike or the positive experiences of the Haywood, Pettibone, and Moyer and Fred Warren exonerations, Sinclair found affirmation for the broadest synthesis of social democratic activism, from the merely liberal-progressive to the most radical-left. Such coalition politics had been suggested in The Jungle. It was still more fully and broadly articulated in The Industrial Republic: A Study of the America of Ten Years Hence. In a futuristic fictional scenario that served as the frame for an essentially nonfiction analysis, Sinclair hypothesized that socialism might be instituted in the United States as early as the election of 1912. Contrary to the cry of the election-day speaker at the conclusion of The Jungle who trusts only the party of the workers to carry out the socialist transformation, The Industrial Republic suggests the role of the Socialist Party need not be anything more than a catalyst, a kind of bogey threatening chaos if social revolutionary changes are not instituted: “The Socialist party is a party of agitation rather than administration; but it is of vital importance that it should everywhere exist, as a party of the last resort, a club held over Society. Everywhere the cry will be: Do this, and do that, or the Socialists will carry the country.”62 The particular set of politicians and the party carrying out the social democratic transformation was of relatively little consequence, Sinclair reasoned. Even a sensation-seeking populist such as William Randolph Hearst, Sinclair hypothesizes, might serve the purpose, as he might aver “with his ten thousand and tenth declaration that he is not a Socialist” yet nevertheless do the work of socialism: “upon a platform of Americanism . . . equal rights for all” effecting “federal ownership of all criminal monopolies.”63 At the same time, Sinclair imagines a critical role not only for mainstream populists and for the Socialists but also for labor unrest and violence of various kinds:
There will be two or three million—perhaps five or ten million—men out of work. . . . They may have forced Congress to provide them some temporary employment—which will, of course, be the first taste of blood to the tiger. They will certainly have been waging strikes of a violence never before known—they will have been shot down in great numbers, and they may have done a great deal of burning and dynamiting. That some particularly conspicuous individual like Mr. Rockefeller or Mr. Baer may be assassinated, seems more than likely; that a “Coxey's Army” of much larger size will have marched on Washington, seems quite certain.64
Thus we see the root of Sinclair's support for the syndicalists and sympathy for the anarchists as well as his appreciation for the insider politics of Frederick Upham Adams.
Affirmation for such a wide left-wing collaboration came from the broadest of historical currents as well as the closest personal experience. If on some points—as in the setback at Paterson—Sinclair was offering utopian projections contrary to the reality of intraparty conflict, he was also reflecting upon genuine and broad-based socialist successes—including one national movement for safe food production in which Sinclair had, of course, been directly involved. For much of his career, Sinclair's line on The Jungle was that it had fallen short of his mark: “I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”65 Such an estimation is consistent with the conclusion at the closing of the novel itself, that a mere “municipal-ownership Democracy” was insufficient to resolve the deep-seated class inequalities exposed by the novel. It is also consistent with his declaration in the aftermath of the Paterson strike, that the “working classes care nothing about old age pensions (or, at any rate, ought not to).” Yet this kind of posturing, the drawing of sharp ideological lines and ramping up of demands, may be seen as participating precisely in the pattern of Socialist agitation for revolutionary change that—by its very extremity and insistence—might make necessary and even palatable more moderate reforms moving U.S. political economy that much closer to social democracy.
This is what The Jungle did when it hit Americans in the stomach. The novel did not stipulate the terms of the Pure Food and Drug Act; it was far from the first expression of concern and outrage against the processing of foodstuffs in the United States. By 1905 two other well-known socialists, Algernon M. Simons and Charles Edward Russell, had written articles on the meatpacking industry, and comprehensive food safety regulations had been drafted into legislation under the tutelage of government researcher Harvey W. Wiley. Robert Crunden reports that 190 bills seeking regulation over food and drug production had been introduced between 1879 and 1906, but only eight minor laws had actually been enacted.66 What The Jungle produced was not new information or new proposals, therefore, but a groundswell of popular outrage linked with the threat of radical political alternatives. The outrage—and the threat—caught the attention of legislators and President Theodore Roosevelt to a degree sufficient to result in the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act by the end of June 1906, less than five months after the appearance of Sinclair's novel in book form.
Whereas Sinclair's quip about America's stomach suggests how far America needed to go to achieve socialism, the fact that federal officials had already crafted legislation that would create the first effective public oversight over the production of food underscores the degree to which social democratic reform was something that could—and did—take place through the process of ordinary democracy and the action of salaried bureaucrats and major-party politicians. Insofar as President Roosevelt was responsive to public pressure and willing to enter into dialogue with a known Socialist (the letters back and forth between the president and Sinclair are featured in Sinclair's My Lifetime in Letters), it seems that the scenario Sinclair laid out immediately thereafter in The Industrial Republic was not so terribly farfetched. Old party ideologies meant little when the Socialist Party was gaining ground at the polls, when a series of journalistic exposés (some by socialists, some by liberals) showed the degree of corruption and mendacity in politics and business, and when, consequently, Progressivism was a banner flown by one or the other of the major political parties, and sometimes by both.
The elitism of the Progressive Era has been described by a number of commentators; its reliance upon half measures and palliatives has been decried by successors of Sinclair who express their contempt for such reforms as “municipal-ownership Democracy” and “old age pensions.”67 Yet the reforms generated during the Progressive Era moved consistently toward a more active federal government role in the supervision and regulation of industry; they moved steadily in the direction of making the government an agent representing the general public, including consumers, workers, and children. From a Socialist perspective, the public was receiving half a loaf, and a worm-eaten and stale half loaf, at that. But it was a half loaf, nonetheless, and the Progressive Era laws, policies, and agencies provided the foundation for further, more ambitious and social democratic reforms to come. Under Theodore Roosevelt, the formerly ineffectual Sherman Anti-Trust Act was actually enforced in celebrated cases against J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. The Interstate Commerce Commission, also created in the nineteenth century but never effective, was for the first time armed with sufficient regulatory authority and staffed with enough officials to carry out a number of its tasks. With the expert advice and advocacy of government researcher Wiley and the support of Roosevelt, the furor over The Jungle led to federal oversight not merely of the meatpacking industry but of all foods and drugs transported across state lines.68
Meanwhile, following Roosevelt's shellacking of the “safe and sane” Democratic candidate of 1904, Alton Parker, the Democratic Party became increasingly united behind William Jennings Bryan's reformism.69 In the election of 1912 the Progressive label was aggressively claimed by Woodrow Wilson (as well as by Roosevelt, running as the presidential candidate of the new, short-lived Progressive Party). Wilson's record as a reformer was at least as important historically as Roosevelt's. In an initial burst of legislation orchestrated by Wilson, the Democrat-led Congress created the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission, both agencies that gave the federal government an important toehold in the regulation of the nation's business, and they passed new antitrust legislation, the Clayton Act, which included a provision that prevented antitrust legislation from being wielded against unions (one of the few ways that the old Sherman Act had been consistently applied and upheld). A second round of legislation, similarly ambitious and progressive, resulted in a national law prohibiting child labor, an eight-hour workday on the railroads, a system of disability compensation for federal workers, a national credit program for farmers, and a steeply progressive federal income tax.70
Throw in the creation of the National Parks Service under Roosevelt, a harbinger of the federal government's subsequent role in environmental policy, and the passage of the constitutional amendment mandating direct election of senators, ratified during Wilson's first administration and a direct response to the domination of business interests in the Senate, and we may find plenty of cause for concluding that the Progressive Era was, in fact, progressive, and in ways that bore fingerprints of many socialist ideals and proposals. It might have seemed far-fetched for Sinclair to imagine in 1908 that a mainstream politician might carry out a socialist program. Who could think of the socialist movement representing so potent a force when its presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, could carry no more than 3 percent of the vote? Who could believe that the breadth of socialist ideas might reach so far into the popular political culture of the United States? Yet Roosevelt himself suggested that his progressivism was a response to radicalism, a stance that echoed Sinclair's proclaimed tactic: “Do this, and do that, or the Socialists will carry the country.” In Roosevelt's words: “I am a radical who most earnestly desires the radical program to be carried out by conservatives. I wish to see industrial and social reforms of a far-reaching nature accomplished in this country, . . . but I want to see that movement take place under sober and responsible men, not under demagogues.”71 Roosevelt was not a radical in any of the senses that would satisfy either the socialists of his day or the various radicals of ours, but the provenance of “radical” as he uses it certainly has everything to do with “far-reaching” changes necessary for social democracy, even as they fall short of its full realization.
THE LUDLOW MASSACRE AND THE FALL OF THE SECOND INTERNATIONALE
“I assure you that to shut your ears to these voices is not courage—it is obstinacy, it is suicidal stupidity. If you persist in doing it, you bring down the storm upon your own head, you have only yourself to blame for what may happen to you.”
Through Sinclair's busy first decade as a Socialist, the author-activist had seen the benefits of a broad and diverse socialist movement, one in which even those elements that had been expelled from the party or never been admitted to it had an important role to play. At the close of that decade, on the eve of the Great War that swiftly ended the Second Internationale, Sinclair was to launch one more major foray into labor activism and socialist politics. In the process, he was compelled to confront the potentially fatal limitations of the anarchist-socialist-progressive coalition politics that he had come to tout. The particular cause was that of the victims of the “Ludlow Massacre,” striking coal miners and their families who had been attacked, and some killed, by agents of the Standard Oil Company and the state of Colorado on April 21, 1914. Sinclair learned the particulars of the miners' plight when a delegation of union leaders and Ludlow miners' wives addressed a New York City gathering on April 27, 1914. Sinclair learned that wages in the coal industry were high only on paper, for there were numerous ways that the companies made work in the mines unprofitable and perilous. Workers were not guaranteed any fixed number of working hours, and they were paid only by the weight of coal actually extracted, so time spent in shoring up unstable passages was effectively unpaid work. Consequently, coal miners in Colorado were four to eight times more likely to die at their trade than miners in the coal fields of Illinois, Iowa, or Missouri. Payment was often in scrip, spendable only at the company store, and the mining towns as well as the mines themselves were company property, so all rents were collected by the company and access to the towns closely controlled by the company.72
In spite of the desperation of those conditions, the United Mine Workers (UMW), the primary labor union active in the coal fields, sought merely recognition as the collective bargaining agent of the miners when it led a strike in 1913–14.73 But the intransigence of the mine owners, spearheaded by the Standard Oil–affiliated Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, led to an escalating spiral of violence. By mid-April the strikers and their families, evicted from the mining companies' towns, were living in tent cities erected near the routes to the mines, where they hoped to head off scabs the company was likely to try to bring in. At one of the largest, housing some 1,200 people near Ludlow, Colorado, troops of the Colorado state militia (payrolled by the coal companies) moved in, razed the tent city, opened fire, and killed twenty-three workers and family members, including two women and eleven children who were asphyxiated in a cellar dug beneath a tent platform.74 After this catastrophe, miners struck back by burning mine properties and for a time seizing control of the town of Trinidad. Quiet was restored only when President Wilson mobilized the National Guard.75 In 1915, the official government investigator of the strike asserted that the Ludlow “rebellion constituted perhaps one of the nearest approaches to civil war and revolution ever known in this country in connection with an industrial conflict.”76
Sinclair's response to the Ludlow Massacre brought together much of what he had learned and found effective by way of socialist agitation over the previous decade. Recalling his tactic during the Paterson strike of bringing the protest right to the doorstep of power and privilege, Sinclair arranged a public protest at the Broadway Avenue headquarters of the Standard Oil Corporation. The action also drew upon other models for radical action: Fred Warren's adroit use of publicity in the mainstream media and the IWW's free speech fights, in which Wobblies spoke on public streets in defiance of local ordinances, were arrested en masse, and soon overwhelmed jail capacity. On April 29, 1914, Sinclair and four other protestors notified the police of their intentions, were arrested for disorderly conduct, and—refusing to pay the fine—spent three well-publicized days in prison. Meanwhile, growing numbers of other picketers continued to appear before the doors of the Standard Oil Company, and city authorities were compelled to leave them alone for fear of flooding the city's jails. By the time Sinclair and the other protestors were released, thousands of spectators had witnessed the picket and newspapers had broadcast word of the Ludlow Massacre throughout the country.77
Sinclair reached out for allies across the radical-to-progressive spectrum and found them in many quarters. While he was in prison, his new wife, the Mississippi-born patrician Mary Craig, led the picketers on Broadway. Sinclair's mentor Leonard Abbott assumed overall direction of the protest, sending picketers, including many anarchists, to the Rockefellers' New York City residence as well as to the Standard Oil headquarters.78 Another prominent anarchist joining the protest was Alexander Berkman, recently released from prison after serving his time for attempting to murder Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead Strike. Others on the picket line were sympathetic liberals, mostly literary types who two decades later would be called fellow travelers: the journalist Lincoln Steffens, poets George Sterling and Clement Wood, novelist Alexander Irvine, and suffragist Elizabeth Freeman.79 Also there were members of the Church of the Social Revolution, a radical Social Gospel fellowship headed by Bouck White, whose members went to the Rockefellers' usual place of worship in New York City and disrupted services on May 10, whereupon they were hauled out by police and arrested.80
Sinclair also found an assortment of allies in Colorado, when over the coming weeks he went there to see the labor conditions for himself, to conduct research for a possible book, and, as he recalls in his Autobiography, “to make publicity there, and to write it.”81 One ally, children's court judge Ben Lindsey, dropped his regular court business in order to accompany a delegation of the wives of Ludlow strikers for an audience with President Wilson.82 Another was Democratic state senator Helen Ring Robinson, who gave Sinclair inside information on a series of legislative maneuvers at the closing of the state assembly's spring session. Specifically, she revealed that the Republican-dominated legislature had rushed through without debate a measure ghostwritten by the coal industry that pledged the state government to “render all assistance . . . in the enforcement of law and the maintenance of order.” Meanwhile, Republican governor Elias Ammons was reassuring President Woodrow Wilson that the state legislature was providing “mediation” between labor and management.83
Sinclair's principal publicity stratagem was to advertise this discrepancy between the state government's professed interest in the common good and its actual collusion with the fuel companies. Competing newspapers provided Sinclair with friends as well as foes to his cause. When Sinclair sought to publicize the governor's false assurances to the president, the Associated Press stonewalled him. The Denver News, however, helped to expose both the governor and the rival Associated Press newspapers by sending its Washington, DC, correspondent to question White House officials. The AP's report held that Wilson had “expressed satisfaction with the situation after he had received Governor Ammons' reply”; the correspondent affiliated with the News found that no one at the White House had expressed any such approval of the governor's handling of Ludlow affair.84 Other journalists provided national alternatives to the line distributed by the Associated Press. George Creel, then a muckraking Denver newsman (later during World War I, the director of the Committee for Public Information), published an article in Everybody's magazine strongly supportive of the Colorado strikers and highly critical of the coal operators. John Reed, a few years before he became famous as a correspondent of the Russian Revolution, published an article in the Metropolitan magazine favorable to the Colorado strikers alongside another by a second correspondent praising Mother Jones, in Colorado to support them.85 Notably, too, the Wilson administration was hardly in collusion with the Colorado state government when it denied being satisfied with the state's “mediation” effort.
On the train home back east on May 26, 1914, Sinclair attempted to reach out still further for friends or—failing that—at least to make additional publicity. Improbably, he composed a personal letter to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., at the time the chief executive in charge of day-to-day operations at the Standard Oil Company. Sinclair knew a considerable number of millionaire socialists; why not multimillionaire or billionaire socialists? It was not the first time he had written a personal letter to a second-generation robber baron. In 1913 Sinclair had addressed an open “Christmas Letter” to Vincent Astor, the heir and executive-in-waiting of another of America's wealthiest families, and Astor had offered a rejoinder in his own letter to the press.
The letter to Rockefeller is, in any case, remarkable for its attempt to synthesize moderate and radical positions. Sinclair informed Rockefeller that a month previously, just when the Ludlow Massacre had been reported and initial decisions about the protests had been debated, one of his friends, “a well known novelist,” had drafted an open letter to be cosigned by Sinclair and many other notable public figures. The letter had charged Rockefeller with murder, and was so “direct and unqualified . . . that it would probably lead to someone's attempting to kill you—and then there would be a reaction, and the cause of the miners would be set back.” Sinclair said that he had persuaded the novelist, along with others, to suspend publication for a time, to see if the administration of Standard Oil might meanwhile relent in the hard line taken against its striking workers. Sinclair thus positions himself as the voice of moderation: he counsels against violence, and restrains those whose actions might, even as a matter of unintended consequence, precipitate it. Simultaneously, however, he lends his voice to condemnation of the Standard Oil Company and of Rockefeller personally. In the same paragraph in which he raises quite directly the prospect of the anarchist propaganda of the deed, he indicates the moral warrant for that “propaganda,” pointedly telling Rockefeller that he regards him as a murderer of the Ludlow miners and reminding the magnate that the legally sanctioned penalty for a murderer is death. Ultimately, Rockefeller himself will be responsible for whatever ill might befall him, as Sinclair concludes (with some hyperbole about the press's unanimity): “All the organs of public opinion are full of evidence against you, of condemnation of your attitude; and I assure you that to shut your ears to these voices is not courage—it is obstinacy, it is suicidal stupidity. If you persist in doing it, you bring down the storm upon your own head, you have only yourself to blame for what may happen to you.”86 Sinclair thus offers a defense for the anarchists even as he protests that he does not himself subscribe to their philosophy.
Unlike Vincent Astor and Theodore Roosevelt before him, John D. Jr. never dignified Sinclair with so much as a line of response. And this time capitalists were not the only ones who did not share in Sinclair's outrage. Conspicuously absent from the picket lines were members of the mainline Socialist Party. The day after his release from prison, Sinclair had dispatched telegrams to Socialist Party offices throughout the country inviting them to extend the protest throughout the United States. Its argument was of a piece with the view that socialists should act in concert with the radical workers' movement to protect their efforts to appropriate the means of production. Meanwhile, he addressed his plea to the New York party in a letter: “There are branch offices of Standard Oil in every town. Cannot you or the National Executive Committee recommend that mourning pickets appear before these offices?”87 Rejections from party locals, especially in New York City, were swift, curt, and in some cases public. Julius Gerber, secretary of the New York County local, dismissed Sinclair's actions as “self-advertising noise”—and in the New York Times, no less.88 Subsequently New York (and national) party leader Morris Hillquit wrote to explain that he had never felt Sinclair's “‘silent mourning' was a manifestation of Socialist activity,” and that “rightly or wrongly, I consider all such movements as distinctly harmful to the cause of Socialism, principally because the unthinking public is but too prone to hold the Socialist Party responsible for them.”89
Moving toward ever greater respectability, proving perfectly capable of administration and government service (rather in contrast to Sinclair's declaration in The Industrial Republic that the Socialists were a party of agitation), Socialists such as Gerber and Hillquit had come to think of the socialist movement as the property of the Socialist Party alone—and their understanding of the party, at that. It was on this basis that they sought to exert party discipline upon the wayward Sinclair. Ironically, at the same time that the public was showing some signs of accepting the party, these party officials maintained a robust skepticism about the intelligence of average American citizens, the “unthinking public.” Sinclair's assumptions were fundamentally different on both counts. The socialist movement was certainly not owned by any one group, but was the sum of many different groups seeking a common goal, even if by different and apparently contradictory means. Sinclair further assumed that the public, the great majority of Americans, could think critically about their political and social life. It was unquestionably the purpose of the picket he had organized to get them to think, just as it had been the purpose of the Ludlow workers delegation to get him to.
When the anarchists shifted the protests to Tarrytown, New York, near the Rockefeller estate, it showed their inclination to see the conflict in personal terms where Sinclair had seen it in institutional ones. When Sinclair, returning from Colorado, chose to support them, he indicated his continuing willingness to collaborate with them even when their philosophies clashed. When some of the citizens of Tarrytown responded with tentative support for both the anarchists and Sinclair, the wisdom of trusting the public was in some measure borne out. To begin with, the anarchists' appeal to personal accountability appears to have hit the mark with a number of progressives in the Tarrytown community, although not without some caveats and complications. A local landowner, Annie Gould, provided her private property for a meeting in support of the anarchists' rights to free speech, though she did so, contradictorily, on the conditions that no anarchists be put on the program. Predictably, when the meeting was held on June 14, it was disrupted by anarchist hecklers.90 Moreover, suspicions that they were being double-crossed seemed to gain credibility after the meeting, for the advice from village officials offered there—that protestors could be free of harassment from the local police by standing on a narrow band of land owned by the City of New York—entirely backfired when the Tarrytown police proved to be no respecters of municipal boundaries. They attacked anarchist protestors, including Alexander Berkman, pursued them with billy clubs flying, and thrust them aboard the return train to the city.91 And yet these legal outrages swayed Gould and other Tarrytown residents toward still greater sympathy for the anarchists. A Tarrytown Daily News editorial upon the June 22 melee found that the reaction of the police “reflected no credit on the village.”92 The perspective of Annie Gould was being reshaped by the irony that those who purported to represent law and order had been neither lawful nor orderly. “I am dreadfully disappointed and ashamed of the conduct of the Tarrytown toughs last night,” she wrote to Sinclair. “Nothing could be more anarchistic than their treatment of people whom they reviled as anarchists.” She concluded that in Tarrytown “there is an element, vulgar and brutal that is more dangerous than the much abused I.W.W.” 93
All this changed on the Fourth of July 1914, when back in New York City three anarchists were blown to pieces while trying to assemble a bomb. The explosion was so powerful that it destroyed the top three stories of a seven-story tenement building and killed a woman in an adjoining apartment. The bomb, Alexander Berkman later explained, was being produced with the intention of assassinating whichever of the Rockefeller magnates the anarchist militants could first get to.94 One of the anarchists killed in the blast, a young French-Canadian named Arthur Caron, was well known by both Upton and Craig; he had been a regular on the picket line. A notebook containing Craig's name was found in one of Caron's pockets, leading police to call upon her first to identify his body.95 Craig could not bring herself to go and neither could Sinclair.96 In the aftermath of the tragedy, Sinclair wanted to come to speak to the citizens of Tarrytown in person—to speak in defense of Caron and of himself as well, for he had offered a personal testimonial to Caron's character between the events of June 22 and those of July 4. Annie Gould asked him to stay away. “The bomb explosion does take it out of our hands,” she reflected; “The tragedy of it seems to impose a great silence.”97 Until that tragedy, Gould and others had been willing to be critical of their neighbor, the world's most powerful scion of capitalism, and had been receptive to the ideals of social democracy, if not anarchism. Sinclair had been an effective advocate for socialism. So had the anarchists as long as they remained courageous advocates of free speech and helpless victims of state violence. But no longer.
Sinclair would persist in defending violent direct action as a reasonable response, if not the response he himself advocated, to capitalist violence. In an open letter he wrote in response to Gould's refusal to help him stage another public meeting, Sinclair explained his equivocal position. While avoiding a direct defense of Caron's conspiratorial bomb-building, Sinclair turned his attention to the $30,000 annual bequest of the Rockefeller family financing the Tarrytown municipality, and to the pending trials of ten anarchists charged with disorderly conduct at the June 22 demonstration (not the police and their deputies, of course):
I can only say that violence breeds violence, and did so long before I was born into the world to tell you about it. I point you to the example of all history; I point you to Russia to-day. You are letting yourself be turned into a little Russia to-day, under the irresistible influence of a $30,000, a month payroll. I can only declare to you my solemn conviction that you will not solve the weighty problems you have before you by your present program of sending ten entirely innocent people to jail for a period long or short.98
Yet in several ways involving both professional and personal decisions, Upton and Mary Craig began to distance themselves from the kind of political struggle in which they had engaged as a response to Ludlow. Expenses associated with the Standard Oil protests had largely drained the Sinclairs' bank account. The anthology The Cry for Justice was conceived, in part, as a moneymaking proposition to shore up their finances. Sinclair received a $1,000 advance for the book from its publisher, and work on his anthology of social protest literature kept him occupied throughout much of the rest of 1914, to the exclusion both of other political activities and work on his novel that was to recount the events of the Colorado strike and Ludlow Massacre.99 The anthology included anarchist works along with many more mainstream figures (Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln), yet this continued intellectual interest in the anarchists no longer translated into standing shoulder to shoulder with them on picket lines. Geographically, too, the Sinclairs were placing distance between themselves and their activities of April, May, and June 1914. Most of the work on The Cry for Justice was done at a house at Croton-on-Hudson lent the Sinclairs by Frederick C. Howe, U.S. commissioner of immigration.100 With work on the anthology mostly complete in the late spring of 1915, the couple removed to the summer home of Craig's family, the Kimbroughs, in Gulfport, Mississippi. In the fall they were on the move again. The initial draft of King Coal was begun in Gulfport and completed in Southern California, which was to become Upton and Craig's permanent residence for the rest of their life together, over forty years.101 Upton Sinclair's activity within socialist politics and protest, which had been almost continuous between the publication of The Jungle and the Fourth of July catastrophe, became channeled more through his writing. As for Craig, Fourth of July 1914 may have been even more fundamentally a watershed moment, for her husband's close scrape with anarchist violence served to justify tendencies that emerged later toward conservatism, secrecy, protectiveness, and paranoia.
The wider consequences of violent action in response to Ludlow were also almost entirely to the detriment of labor. Although the Rockefellers had only been menaced, never actually harmed physically, the horribly botched assassination plot rippled far beyond the lives of the three anarchists and the innocent bystander that had been lost. The hope of a positive publicity campaign in sympathy with the Ludlow miners—the kind of national outcry that Sinclair and his comrades recognized as having been the key to The Jungle's political success—was utterly lost. Following government investigations that had begun in the spring, Woodrow Wilson in September made a proposal for settling the strike: striking miners were to be rehired, state laws were to be reinforced, and a grievance procedure instituted, although the union was not to be recognized and picketing was prohibited. The UMW immediately accepted. The Standard Oil subsidiary in the coal fields, the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, led the other coal operators in flatly rejecting the proposal, pledging instead to establish their own, internal board of arbitration “for the peaceful adjustment of any differences that may arise.”102 This “permanent and impartial body” rapidly evolved into a full-fledged company union. In December, with replacement workers and defectors from the union operating the mines at nearly full capacity, the UMW draining its coffers, and the election in November bringing into state office the “law and order” candidates backed by the coal companies, the miners voted to end their strike. By the fall of 1915, the workers voted to approve the company union first proposed a year earlier, a body that government investigator George P. West recognized would “deceive the public and lull criticism, while permitting the Company to maintain its absolute power.”103
Ironies abounded in the timing of the July Fourth incident. In the very month in which Arthur Caron was killed making a bomb meant for a family that had directly benefitted from the suffering and the deaths of their employees—and Caron roundly condemned for his anarchist philosophy and plot—a war was breaking out in which millions of young men would be killed senselessly, and those killings lauded as a righteous patriotic duty. In the tiff between Sinclair and the pols of the Socialist Party over picketing the Standard Oil Company, the mainline socialist leaders had worried that Sinclair's protest over the Ludlow Massacre might not be a properly respectable form of socialist activism. Then in August 1914, likewise in accord with their respectability as responsible mainstream parties, all of the major Socialist parties of Europe voted in favor of war credits in their national parliaments, thus acting in support of a war that sent millions of proletarians to their deaths and led to the dissolution of the Second Internationale. The very forces of respectability and parliamentarianism that had made for the Internationale's success undermined it in a fortnight. Violence on the most massive scale was permissible as long as it was in defense of the ancien régimes and the capitalist and imperialist status quo. But violence against the state—and even nonviolence when the state prescribed violence in its defense—those were treasonous and outrageous.
Many socialists resolved these contradictions by accepting their logic: if violence were justified in defense of an obviously faulty social order, how much more would it be justified in the promotion of equality and freedom? The nations of Europe had sowed war, with the respectable pols of the Social Democracy pitching in, and together they reaped the whirlwind of the Third Internationale. Other socialists including Sinclair, Gilman, and Du Bois found they had to live with the apparent double standard, whereby capitalists and imperialists could maim, oppress, and kill with relative impunity while socialists who so much as contemplated violence were branded enemies of society. To persuade their fellow citizens that social democracy would make their lives better, not worse or just the same, socialists would need to hold themselves and their movement up to higher ethical standards in their political tactics as well as in their ultimate aims. Sinclair came to this position gradually and somewhat reluctantly. He had collaborated with the anarchists, defended Arthur Caron gamely even when he had been revealed to be a coconspirator in a bomb plot. Yet he recognized that the errant bomb blast had not only been self-destructive for Caron but also destructive of any further progress in the case against Standard Oil and the Rockefellers. He would defend anarchists and syndicalists again. In the 1920s, he helped to found the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union largely in defense of the free-speech rights of the Industrial Workers of the World. He also became one of the leading public voices defending the rights of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. In doing so, however, he would distinguish sharply between the violent praxis they sometimes espoused and the benevolent socialist philosophy they preached. He honored their willingness to suffer and even to die for their cause and condemned the courts and politicians who persecuted them, but he also criticized them for their advocacy of violence in return for violence. In subsequent discussions, including many arguments with Communists over the question of violence, Sinclair cited his experience with Caron and the Tarrytown anarchists. On the right wing of the socialist movement, Sinclair saw the Progressive present and dreamed the possibility of a social democratic future. On the far left, he saw the face of Arthur Caron and turned away in grief and remorse. That way, he finally resolved, lay madness.