February 26, 1906: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is published. It has a great effect on American life -- but not the one its author intended.
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. was born on September 20, 1878 in Baltimore, but, due to his father's alcoholism and inability to hold a job, he grew up in many places. He turned out to be a child genius, and, just days before his 14th birthday, living in Queens, he entered City College of New York. He wrote for local magazines, and made enough money to not only pay his tuition -- CCNY did not yet offer free tuition for City residents -- but, by age 17, to pay his parents' rent.
He graduated from CCNY, but then dropped out of Columbia University School of Law to focus on writing. He published his 1st novel, King Midas, in 1901. By 1904, he had written 4 novels, 3 with a Socialist theme, and Manassas, a story of the American Civil War.
That year, for 7 weeks, he worked undercover in Chicago's meatpacking plants to see the working conditions. The result was The Jungle, which exposed those conditions, and the lives of the immigrants working there, many of whom continued to work while sick, because they couldn't afford not to. The novel was serialized in the Socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason the following year, and published in novel form the year after that.
What Sinclair wanted was to have America see that unregulated capitalism was destroying the lives of its workers, and call upon their government to do something about it. What he got was very different: Most people were appalled not by the working conditions and the living conditions on the South Side of Chicago and its slums, but by the process of the production of food.
It was like reading Moby Dick and moving toward electricity because whale oil is hard to obtain, instead of learning the lesson that when you seek revenge, you should dig two graves. Or reading On the Road, and instead of realizing that "kicks" are temporary, while art is forever, and beauty, friendship and love are what you should really seek, you go out and buy a car and drive out to California. Or reading All the President's Men, and instead of demanding that your government not do things like what the Nixon Administration did in Watergate, believing that all government is corrupt, and you need a "white knight" to fix it all, and turning to Ronald Reagan -- or Donald Trump.
The President then, Theodore Roosevelt, launched an investigation of the meatpacking industry. This led to the Pure Food and Drug Act, which revolutionized food safety. Sinclair wrote that this was not enough, and he considered it a way of buying the meat and meatpacking barons off.
Nevertheless, TR publicly said that a Republican crook is as bad as a Democratic crook. In a 1907 speech, he denounced "malefactors of great wealth," going on to say that there was a great contest between himself and them: "I regard this contest as one to determine who shall rule this free country: The people through their governmental agents, or a few ruthless and domineering men, whose wealth makes them peculiarly formidable, because they hide behind the breastworks of corporate organization."
Sinclair didn't give up, ripping one great industry after another with his books: Wall Street in The Moneychangers in 1908, King Coal in 1917, education with The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools in 1924, Oil! in 1927 (which would be adapted into the 2007 film There Will Be Blood), the American justice system in Boston the same year (in the wake of the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti), and the auto industry in The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America in 1937 (in the wake of Henry Ford's private armies firing on pro-union demonstrators).
One of the oil barons he detested was Harry Sinclair, who was also a sports mogul, running the Indianapolis-turned-Newark franchise of the Federal League, and breeding horses that, between them, won 3 Kentucky Derbies and 3 Belmont Stakes. He spent 6 months in prison for jury tampering during the Teapot Dome scandal. He and Upton Sinclair were not related.
Nor was either related to Sinclair Lewis, 7 years younger, who spent most of the 1920s publishing similar exposés of American life, and published anti-fascist literature in the 1930s. Sinclair Lewis admired Upton Sinclair, who nonetheless wrote to him and offered a criticism alternately glowing and stinging, but, in my opinion, accurate in both cases:
Everything of yours that I have read is about half and half… Wherever you are writing about the underworld, you are at your best, and when you come up to your own social level or higher, you are no good.
In 1934, with TR's cousin Franklin Roosevelt having become President and implemented the early part of his New Deal, Upton Sinclair left the Socialist Party and joined the Democratic Party, and ran for Governor of California. He called his movement EPIC: End Poverty In California. Although he had no experience in public office, he meant it, and people believed that he meant it.
No one believed it more than the Hollywood studio bosses, all of them conservative Calvin Coolidge-style, FDR-hating Republicans because they were very wealthy. They used the media, including the San Francisco-based empire of William Randolph Hearst (once a Democratic Congressman representing a district in New York City, but now one of the most conservative men in America), to make false propaganda claims, including the idea that a Governor Sinclair would turn California "Communist." They also pressured their employees to vote for the incumbent Republican Governor, Frank Merriam.
Merriam won with 48.9 percent of the vote, the Sinclair's 37.8, and Progressive Party nominee Raymond Haight's 13.0. In popular votes, Merriam won 1,138,000 to Sinclair's 879,000. Of California's 58 Counties, Sinclair won only 6, while Haight won 3.
Because of the 3-way vote, Sinclair didn't top 46 percent in any County, topping out at 45.6 in Contra Costa County, in the East Bay across from San Francisco. He got 42.0 percent in Los Angeles County, and 38.9 percent in San Francisco County (contiguous with the City of San Francisco), 37.7 percent in Alameda County (including Oakland and Berkeley), and 36.6 percent in San Diego -- but didn't win any of those big Counties. Haight's presence on the ballot didn't cost him the election; the Red-baiting media buy did.
In 1951, the year that Sinclair Lewis died, Upton Sinclair wrote, "The American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label. I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC... I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie. There is no use attacking it by a front attack, it is much better to out-flank them."
He died in a nursing home in Bound Brook, Somerset County, New Jersey on November 25, 1968, a few weeks after his 90th birthday. Ironically, Bound Brook was then, and for many years thereafter, the home of the publishing house for the extreme right-wing John Birch Society. He is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
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February 26, 1906 was a Monday. Baseball was about to start Spring Training. Football was in the off-season. Basketball and hockey were still all-amateur. There were no games on this historic day. However, the next 2 days saw a challenge for the Stanley Cup, then a "challenge trophy": You won the series, you got the Cup.
The Ottawa Hockey Club, a.k.a. the Silver Seven and forerunners of the original Ottawa Senators (who went out of business in 1934, during Upton Sinclair's campaign for Governor), defeated Queen's University of Kingston, Ontario, 16-7 on February 27, and 12-7 on February 8, to retain the Cup.
On March 6 and 8, they defeated Smiths Falls Hockey Club to keep the Cup again. Then they took on the Montreal Wanderers, a bunch of small but tough guys known as "The Little Men of Iron." Featuring future NHL team bosses Art Ross and Lester Patrick on defense, the Wanderers beat Ottawa 9-1 in Montreal on March 14. Ottawa won 9-3 in Ottawa on March 17. But since it was a two-games, total-goals series, Montreal beat Ottawa on aggregated, 12-10, and won the Cup. It was the 1st of 4 times in 5 years that they would win it.
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