6
The Muckraker: How a Lost Letter Revealed Upton Sinclair’s Deception
Boston, Massachusetts
August 23, 1927
12:20 A.M.
Bartolomeo Vanzetti entered the execution room calmly, though fear threatened to overwhelm him. His face was pale and drawn, a result of his six-year imprisonment.
Stemming back to colonial days, Massachusetts had been one of the first states to carry out executions. Hangings had once been common, but, since 1900, the electric chair had been the commonwealth’s primary means of judgment.
Five minutes earlier, Vanzetti had heard his lifelong friend Nicola Sacco scream “Long live anarchy!” as the prison guards strapped him to the electric chair. Then the lights flickered, the machine whirred, and his friend’s screams abruptly stopped.
Now it was Vanzetti’s turn.
Having refused the chaplain’s offer of a prayer and last rites, he walked up the steps to the chair and sat down. He watched as the guards tightened the leather straps around his ankles and wrists and applied metal electrodes all over his body. Then, addressing his executioners, he said, “I wish to tell you that I am innocent, and that I never committed any crime but sometimes some sin. I am innocent of all crime, not only of this, but all.
“I am an innocent man.”
He looked at the executioner and gave a solemn nod. It was time.
Boston, Massachusetts
August 23, 1927
6:30 A.M.
Boston was a city that prided itself on tradition, yet reveled in the rebellion of the Boston Tea Party, the Boston Massacre, and the midnight ride of Paul Revere. It was a city of privilege for America’s first families, known as the Boston Brahmins, and a vibrant hub for tens of thousands of Irish and Italian immigrants who had fled despair and famine on the other side of the Atlantic. But, in the past few years, this once harmonious melting pot had become a cauldron of racial tension and anti-immigrant animosity.
At the center of the fray were two young Italians who had been convicted of armed robbery and murder. Their appeals had been going on for six years.
Their prosecutors claimed they were terrorists. Their defenders claimed they were scapegoats.
Their names were Sacco and Vanzetti.
• • •
The man with an oversize head, strong Roman nose, and fair skin without a trace of facial hair strolled up Beacon Hill at sunrise and reflected on what had brought him to this crossroads of American history. Far from his normally youthful, boyish look, Upton Sinclair now had dark circles beneath his eyes, the result of marching all night with more than twenty-five thousand Italian-Americans and other protesters who had flocked to Boston over the news that Sacco and Vanzetti were about to be executed.
The so-called trial of the century in Boston had captured the imagination of the American public. During the trial and the appeals process, protesters gathered in picket lines outside the courthouse. “If these men are executed, justice is dead in Massachusetts,” one of their signs read. The plight of the two Italian anarchists had become a cause célèbre for many fellow intellectuals, socialists, and artists, from George Bernard Shaw and Albert Einstein to John Dos Passos and H. G. Wells.
Upton Sinclair was determined to outdo all of them. Never short on hyperbole, he dubbed the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti “the most shocking crime that has been committed in American history since the assassination of Lincoln.”
He was angry, and, as America’s foremost muckraking journalist, he was in a position to do something about it by writing the definitive account of their railroading due to political bias and anti-immigrant prejudice.
These anarchists, Sinclair believed, could be the face of the new American Revolution, one that would usher in a new era of socialism. While some saw anarchism as the antithesis of the top-down government control under socialism, Sinclair and other socialists around the world saw in Sacco and Vanzetti all the evidence they needed to prove the evilness and injustice of the capitalist system. “To the workers of the whole world,” Sinclair told his friends, “it is a warning to get organized and check the bloodlust of capitalism.”
But Sinclair thought some good might still come from the tragedy. In the two decades since the publication of his bestselling book, The Jungle, he had suffered a number of setbacks. He had been involved in various extramarital romances, survived a divorce from his wife, flirted with increasingly radical politics, and had built a utopian community in upstate New York called Helicon Hall. But he still had his pen and his zeal for justice. And he knew that was all he needed.
“What an ironic twist of fate,” Sinclair muttered to himself, “that these Italian seekers of liberty should have been convicted within sight of Plymouth Rock, and killed on ground over which Paul Revere had ridden.”
Now it was his personal mission to make sure their deaths were not in vain. He had come to Boston sensing an opportunity to plunge a dagger into the heart of the miserable country he believed America had become—and that’s exactly what he intended to do.
26 Years Earlier
Leek Island
Ontario, Canada
June 30, 1901
“Uppie, sit down,” Meta Sinclair implored, sunlight shining through the window on her long dark hair. The tone of his wife’s voice was unmistakably grave, but her soft, gentle manner put young Upton Sinclair at ease.
Meta beckoned Sinclair to the side of the bed. Their home, a rustic cabin on a bend in the St. Lawrence River, was the young couple’s refuge from the world—and from their parents’ disapproval. Meta enjoyed getting lost in the woods; it was one of the few places where she could keep the voices in her head at bay. Upton found it a fine hideaway to do his writing. The words flowed easier when there were no distractions.
“I’m—” She paused, her voice trembling. She tried again. “I’m, pr—” She couldn’t get the word out. She didn’t have to. He knew. She broke down in tears. He couldn’t hold back his tears, either. This was what he had been dreading. Indeed, it was his fear of fathering a child that had led him to tell Meta that they should “live as brother and sister.” That hadn’t lasted long.
The idea of fatherhood had never appealed to Sinclair. His memories of his own father were vague. Time had blotted out much of the unpleasantness of the past. But he could still recall his teenage years living with his father, a penniless liquor and hat salesman, in New York City boardinghouses that reeked of booze and cheap perfume. Even when his dad hit rock bottom he still possessed the airs of the southern aristocracy to which he had been born: the sense of entitlement, the cold arrogance.
Upton couldn’t bear the thought of bringing a child of his own into this world, let alone into the United States. Turn-of-the-century capitalist America, he believed, was a land of exploitation, brutality, and class warfare. Only when the masses woke up and turned their factory tools into weapons might there be a future fit for raising a child.
There were other reasons, too—selfish ones: A baby’s incessant demands for love and attention, along with its ceaseless wailing, would interfere with his crusade for social justice. He needed to concentrate on the works of Marx and Engels and to pour himself into his writing. He had a calling—and it wasn’t fatherhood; it was to become a propagandist—a term he used proudly—for the cause of socialism, and to topple capitalism by educating Americans and persuading them to overthrow their government.
Sinclair was nothing if not a man with an outsize ego. Even though he had a series of literary flops that left him on the verge of bankruptcy, he was convinced that his gift for the written word made him the right man to lead the country into a new era of enlightenment and social equality.
But a child? That would ruin everything.
Leek Island
Ontario, Canada
August 4, 1901
Meta Sinclair flung herself from the bed, trying to slam her belly against the floor. She and Upton had debated whether to visit the local doctor, bu
t an abortion would not only be illegal; it would also be dangerous. In the end, they decided to end the pregnancy themselves by attempting to induce a miscarriage.
Meta had foraged for herbal remedies, which she had ingested with food and drank as teas. She had exercised vigorously in the hope that the strain might prove too much for the child inside her. But nothing worked. This baby was determined to come into the world.
Whether his parents wanted him to or not.
Union Stock Yards
Packingtown, Chicago
October 8, 1904
A quiet rage seethed in Sinclair as he walked through the muddy streets around the stockyards. His gait was purposeful, his lips pursed as he took in the sights—and the stench—of his surroundings. He was glad to be away from the constant demands and distractions of his family. Meta was a gorgeous, sensual woman, but she had wild mood swings and fierce bouts of depression and rage. And, of course, he had no concern about not being around the son he never wanted.
At the age of twenty-six, Upton Sinclair was excitable and prone to working himself up into a righteous fury that would paralyze him with nervous tension, indigestion, and migraines. But today his mind was clear. He was armed with his lunch pail and his powers of observation. None of his previous writing projects had achieved the success he sought, but he had every confidence that this one would be different. In fact, Appeal to Reason, the nation’s leading socialist weekly newspaper, had already agreed to serialize his reporting from Packingtown, home of the Union Stock Yards.
Built over a swamp in South Chicago, the Yards could accommodate more than 75,000 hogs, 21,000 cattle, and 22,000 sheep at any one time, making it the meatpacking center of the world, the Capital of Slaughter. The railroads brought ten million animals to the Yards each year to be slaughtered, their parts processed and shipped to consumers from San Francisco to New York, to London and beyond.
But it wasn’t a sense of empathy for the animals that filled the young writer with anger. He seethed because the men and women who worked there were pawns of capitalists and business tycoons who profited handsomely from the bloody, dangerous work their underlings performed each day. This was slavery for a new generation.
He knew how that sounded. Yes, he supposed, it was true that these workers hadn’t been pulled from their homes by force. They had, in fact, flocked here by the thousands from eastern and southern Europe in search of jobs. Sinclair also knew that these workers wouldn’t be beaten or killed if they tried to leave. Still, he reasoned, they were slaves nonetheless. Slaves to their own desperation. Slaves to a system that rewards the wealthy few at the expense of the desperate, starving many. These men were barely paid. They were stripped of their dignity, void of their very humanity.
“Wage slavery” is what Sinclair called this new kind of bondage propagated by greedy capitalists. And he was resolved to end it by writing a book that would expose the scheme and provoke enough outrage to inspire a new revolution. He intended for his book to do for organized labor and the socialist movement what Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done for the cause of abolition before the Civil War.
It would be called The Jungle.
Packingtown, Chicago
October 14, 1904
The metallic smell of blood invaded Sinclair’s nostrils. He walked down the center aisle of the hog room past hundreds of hanging carcasses. This was where the whole hogs were hung and split down the backbone with a two-foot blade. Even at this stage, after the fatal hammer blow to the head, slit throat, and severed major arteries and veins, even after the entrails were removed and the carcass was hung on hooks, there was blood. It caked the floor and spattered the walls.
This was industrial-age killing, an assembly line of meat production. Or, as Sinclair liked to think of it, a “disassembly line.” The process of slaughtering an animal and packing up its meat involved eighty separate jobs. There were the knockers, the leg breakers, the rippers, and the gutters. Hooks moved the animals through the factory to the smokers, the salters, the picklers, the canners. And those were just the workers who dealt with the meat. There were also workers who turned the organs, the bones, and the fat into lard, soap, and fertilizer.
A satisfied smile crossed Sinclair’s lips. He had managed to convince the plant foreman that he was a Polish immigrant needing a job inside the Armour meatpacking factory. He marveled at his own gift for duplicity and the ease with which he could fool others. Of course, he didn’t dare bring his reporter’s notepad with him. Instead he memorized everything he saw and then rushed back to his room across the railroad tracks to write it all down.
This is how he would make his mark. His father had gone in and out of this world without making any impact—other than depriving it of a few barrels of whiskey.
But not him.
The Jungle, he knew, would make him a legend.
The White House
Washington, D.C.
April 4, 1906
The hulking man pulled the spectacles off his nose. A less imposing figure might have looked small behind the massive desk in the Oval Office, but not the barrel-chested Theodore Roosevelt. Five years earlier, at just forty-seven years old, he had become the youngest president ever to assume office. Roosevelt carried himself with the youthful vigor of a man many years younger. A writer of considerable talent, he fancied himself a man of letters, which was one of the reasons why he had invited Upton Sinclair to the White House.
Teddy Roosevelt prided himself on his ability to accurately size people up. As he looked at the young man who entered his office, he sensed that the fellow was a bit of an upstart, brimming with a little too much self-confidence. But the president also got the feeling that the man’s heart was in the right place.
Roosevelt had made something of a career out of assailing monopolies, often to the detriment of customers and workers. He also liked to see his name in the newspapers. When he was governor of New York, he often held press conferences twice a day, making sure reporters would have ample opportunity to learn of his successes and giving himself a chance to rail unchallenged against those he deemed corrupt.
For these and other reasons, the president was receptive to Sinclair’s book, The Jungle. Assuming office after the assassination of President William McKinley, Roosevelt was a forceful presence on the national stage. He was eager to use his power to bring America’s enemies to heel, whether they be recalcitrant heads of state or capitalists at home who needed to have their heads knocked together.
Roosevelt agreed with Sinclair’s conclusion that avaricious capitalist meatpackers were colluding to form a monopoly and take advantage of the working class. He reasoned that these arrogant, wealthy industrialists needed to be put back in their place, just as he, the trust-busting president, had done with the railroad barons and with John Rockefeller and his Standard Oil monopoly. Roosevelt was also not an idiot when it came to politics: He saw the wisdom of supporting a book that had quickly won national acclaim and press attention.
Over the past year, Roosevelt and Sinclair, two self-described crusaders for justice, had exchanged long letters, the last of which had ended with an invitation from the president. “If you can come down here during the first week in April,” Roosevelt wrote, “I shall be particularly glad to see you.”
• • •
The majesty of the president’s office, the living, beating heart of the American capitalist system, impressed even a skeptic like Sinclair. The office had been refurbished only a few years earlier as part of the effort to build a suite of executive offices for Roosevelt and his staff. It would eventually become known as the West Wing.
As the president rose and extended a hand to Sinclair, the author noted that a dog-eared copy of The Jungle was conspicuously displayed on Roosevelt’s desk. Sinclair knew that Roosevelt was a speed-reader with a reputation for consuming books with enthusiasm and vigor. He was said to read a book before breakfast and as many as two or three more by dinnertime. Once asked by a friend to r
ecommend a book, Roosevelt had suggested a hundred, all of which he’d claimed to have read in the previous two years.
“Welcome to Washington, my boy,” the president said affably. He gestured to a chair, urged Sinclair to sit, and took a seat across from him.
An aide opened the door to the office. “Some cookies and tea, sir?” he asked.
“None for me,” Roosevelt responded, patting his stomach. “I’m trying to get back into shape for tennis season now that the weather is turning bearable again. But Mr. Sinclair here will have some.”
Roosevelt had mastered the politician’s skill of studied sincerity. He also had a habit of getting right to the point. “I want to thank you for bringing these problems in Chicago’s stockyards to my attention—”
“America’s attention, Mr. President,” Sinclair interrupted.
Roosevelt nodded vigorously. “That’s right. America’s attention. We’re going to be sending a team of investigators—the best of the best—to take a look into the allegations—”
“They’re not allegations,” Sinclair interrupted again. If the president thought he was going to dominate a conversation with someone of Sinclair’s intelligence and stature, he was very wrong.
Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t used to being interrupted. The atmosphere in the room quickly chilled.
“But, Mr. Sinclair, by your own admission, you have written a novel. And surely, like all novelists, you have taken some creative license.”
“No, everything I wrote in The Jungle is the truth. It’s the truth about what goes on in those infernal factories, and what happens to the people who spend their lives working in them. My book is an exact and faithful picture of the conditions that exist in Packingtown, Chicago, down to the smallest details. It is as true as a study written by a sociologist.”
Sinclair’s cheeks reddened. He was working himself into a lather again.