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Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, by Anthony Arthur,
Random House. 377 pp. $27.95

Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century, by Kevin Mattson
John Wiley & Sons. 294 pp. $29.95

A century after its publication, The Jungle remains the single work for which Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) is remembered, when he is remembered at all. Yet in terms of Sinclair’s own radical political goals, his international bestseller was something of a failure. The picaresque, Dickensian tale of an immigrant stockyard worker at the mercy of corrupt bosses and politicians, squalid working and living conditions, and the frigid, stormy Chicago winter didn’t even come close to fomenting the socialist revolution that is forecast in its closing pages.

Nevertheless, the novel was a sensation. Its sordid account of the making of sausages from spoiled hams in vermin-infested factories and other unsanitary practices of the meatpacking industry helped spur passage of both the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. Sinclair himself famously said: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” Those legislative coups, almost unthinkable for a novel published today, vaulted the twenty-seven-year-old Sinclair into the first rank of “muckrakers,” a less-than-flattering term coined by President Theodore Roosevelt at least partly in response to The Jungle.

Only a few decades removed from the Civil War, Sinclair was writing self-consciously in the social activist tradition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and like Harriet Beecher Stowe, he largely eschewed literary elegance for a flat-out emotional appeal. For all its preachiness, tacit racism, and melodramatic plot turns, The Jungle is still a surprisingly gripping read. Some of the food-handling nastiness it depicted remain relevant, as one of its recent nonfiction successors, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, revealed. Sinclair’s evident passion for his subject, as we now know, was paired with first-rate undercover reportage, and his methods are well described in Radical Innocent, Anthony Arthur’s graceful new biography. Arthur also sheds light on Sinclair’s ongoing battle with the journalistic establishment, particularly the then archconservative Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times.

Radical Innocent is part of a centennial outpouring of Sinclair-related books. Among them are a reissue of The Jungle (Modern Library), for which Arthur wrote an afterword; a playfully postmodernist historical novel by Chris Bachelder, U.S.! (Bloomsbury); and another biography, Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century, by Kevin Mattson, that emphasizes Sinclair’s relationship with the changing political currents of his time.

Mattson, Connor Study Professor of Contemporary History at Ohio University, and Arthur, professor emeritus of literature at California State University, rely on much of the same source material: Sinclair’s papers in the collection of the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington and the author’s own prodigious (ninety books!) literary output. Much of the ground they cover is therefore identical, and only a specialist will need to read both.

Mattson concentrates on Sinclair’s evolution from socialist to anticommunist liberal (and supporter of the Vietnam War), a change that he sees as a political maturation. He views Sinclair’s life as “full of lessons . . . about the possibilities and limitations of radical protest.” Arthur’s biography — which also investigates the tension between innocence and experience in Sinclair’s life — is the more thorough, and dwells more fully on his three marriages, particularly his tumultuous first union with Meta Fuller. Arthur’s major concern is to burnish Sinclair’s negligible literary reputation. He concedes that the novelist wrote both too hastily and too much, often self-publishing when his efforts failed to attract commercial sponsors. But he argues that works such as Boston, Sinclair’s nuanced historical novel about the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and the Lanny Budd spy novels (among them, the 1943 Pulitzer Prize-winning Dragon’s Teeth, about the Nazis’ rise to power) deserve reconsideration.

Radical Innocent is the better source for the story of Sinclair’s forays into undercover journalism, as well as his lifelong war with a series of media titans. Arthur suggests that Sinclair’s first major reportorial endeavor involved penetrating the military academies at both West Point and Annapolis to write novelistic sagas about cadet life. Arthur doubts that Sinclair actually disguised himself in a West Point uniform, but says that he failed to inform his sources of his true purpose. Though his deception would likely raise questions today, Sinclair appears to have been something of a journalistic prodigy. “Working undercover . . . . ,” Arthur writes, “the young Sinclair persuaded people he didn’t know to talk to him at great length, often revealing more than they knew. An avid and intelligent listener, he flattered his confidants with his attention.”

Those same skills facilitated Sinclair’s research for The Jungle. Generously aided by other, more experienced writers, as well as Chicago settlement house workers (including Jane Addams), Sinclair conducted interviews with “plant foremen and laborers, priests and bartenders, policemen and politicians and undertakers,” Arthur writes. In addition to taking at least one authorized tour of the P.D. Armour meat-processing plant, Sinclair, with his own shabby clothes and a lunch bucket in hand, “wandered unimpeded through the vast Armour facilities, memorizing details of what he saw, then rushing back to his room to write everything down.”

The Jungle was first published serially in the socialist political journal Appeal to Reason, and Sinclair resisted demands by one prospective publisher, Macmillan, to tone down its more brutal passages. Doubleday, Page & Company eventually expressed interest in publishing the work — but first, unbeknownst to Sinclair, sent the manuscript to the managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, James Keeley, to vet its accuracy. According to Arthur, the report that came back was a “damning indictment” of The Jungle — authored by “a publicity agent of the packers.”

This was not to be the last time Sinclair butted heads with the corruption and conservatism of the establishment media. A frequent antagonist was the Los Angeles Times, which helped derail his 1934 gubernatorial bid. Sinclair had already run several unsuccessful political campaigns as a Socialist. But with the Depression wracking California, he switched his allegiance to the Democratic Party, and won the primary on a progressive platform. With his general-election victory a real possibility, the Los Angeles Times not only editorialized against Sinclair’s job-creation proposals as a magnet to attract “‘a horde of radical Communists, agitators and anarchists’” to the state, but (Arthur writes) “closed its pages to any semblance of objective reporting about Sinclair’s campaign, running only negative stories.” In the end, Sinclair, also hurt by FDR’s silence, lost handily.

Well before this watershed experience, Sinclair had established his bona fides as a press critic. His 1919 work, The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism, is regarded by both Mattson and Arthur with modest approval. The book, which Arthur calls a “cult classic,” seems astonishingly prescient in its critique of the coziness of big media and other corporate interests. Now available in its entirety online, The Brass Check tells the story of the Chicago Tribune’s sleazy attempt to suppress the news of The Jungle, as well as numerous other postpublication attacks on its accuracy. Fueled by both politics and personal pique, Sinclair argues for fact-checking, unions, the rejection of advertising, and (in Mattson’s words) “public ownership without control over content.” It’s a reformist agenda that today seems at once idealistic and prophetic.

To read the articles in the July/August 2006 issue, click here.

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