Part 11

I remember being invited to Hull House to dinner and sitting next to the saintly Jane Addams. I got into an argument with her consecrated band, and upheld my contention that the one useful purpose of settlements was the making of settlement workers into socialists. Afterward Jane Addams remarked to a friend that I was a young man who had a great deal to learn. Both she and I went on diligently learning, so that when we met again, we did not have so much to argue over.

One stroke of good fortune for me was the presence in Chicago of Adolphe Smith, correspondent of the _Lancet_, the leading medical paper of Great Britain. Smith was one of the founders of the Social-Democratic Federation in England, and at the same time an authority on abattoirs, having studied the packing plants of the world for the _Lancet_. Whenever I was in doubt about the significance of my facts--when I wondered if possibly my horror might be the oversensitiveness of a young idealist--I would fortify myself by Smith’s expert, professional horror. “These are not packing plants at all,” he declared; “these are packing boxes crammed with wage slaves.”

At the end of a month or more, I had my data and knew the story I meant to tell, but I had no characters. Wandering about “back of the yards” one Sunday afternoon I saw a wedding party going into the rear room of a saloon. There were several carriages full of people. I stopped to watch, and as they seemed hospitable, I slipped into the room and stood against the wall. There the opening chapter of _The Jungle_ began to take form. There were my characters--the bride, the groom, the old mother and father, the boisterous cousin, the children, the three musicians, everybody. I watched them one after another, fitted them into my story, and began to write the scene in my mind, going over it and over, as was my custom, fixing it fast. I went away to supper, and came back again, and stayed until late at night, sitting in a chair against the wall, not talking to anyone, just watching, imagining, and engraving the details on my mind. It was two months before I got settled at home and first put pen to paper; but the story stayed, and I wrote down whole paragraphs, whole pages, exactly as I had memorized them.

VII

Our life in the little sixteen-by-eighteen cabin had been wretched, and we had set our hearts upon getting a regular farmhouse. We had gone riding about the neighborhood, imagining ourselves in this house and that--I looking for economy, and Corydon looking for beauty, and both of us having the “blues” because the two never came together. Finally Corydon had her way--in imagination at any rate; we chose a farm with a good eight-room house that could be bought for $2,600, one thousand cash and the rest on mortgage. There were sixty acres to the place, with good barns, a wood lot, and three orchards; we imagined a cow, some chickens, a horse and buggy--and persuaded ourselves that all this would pay for itself.

Now, before starting on _The Jungle_, I went to call upon Dr. Savage, who had married us; I poured out my woes upon his devoted head. I told him how Corydon had come close to suicide the previous winter and how I dreaded another siege in our crowded quarters. I so worked upon his feelings that he agreed to lend me a thousand dollars, and take another mortgage on the farm as security. Poor, kind soul, he must have listened to many a painful story in that big church study of his! He assured me he was not a rich man, and I was glad when I was able to repay the money at the end of a year.

We moved into the new, palatial quarters, elegantly furnished with odds and ends picked up at the “vendues” that were held here and there over the countryside whenever some one died or moved away. You stood around in the snow and stamped your feet, and waited for a chance to bid on a lot of three kitchen chairs, with one seat and two rungs missing, or a dozen dishes piled in a cracked washbasin. You paid cash and had twenty-four hours in which to fetch your goods. I purchased a cow at such a sale, also a horse and buggy.

For my previous winters writing I had built with my own hands a little cabin, eight feet wide and ten feet long, roofed with tar paper, and supplied with one door and one window. In it stood a table, a chair, a homemade shelf for books, and a little round potbellied stove that burned coal--since the urgencies of inspiration were incompatible with keeping up a wood fire. This little cabin was now loaded onto a farmer’s wagon and transported to the new place, and set up on an exposed ridge; in those days I valued view more than shelter, but nowadays I am less romantic, and keep out of the wind. To this retreat I repaired on Christmas Day, and started the first chapter of _The Jungle_.

For three months I worked incessantly. I wrote with tears and anguish, pouring into the pages all the pain that life had meant to me. Externally, the story had to do with a family of stockyard workers, but internally it was the story of my own family. 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 had only cotton blankets, and had put rugs on top of us, and cowered shivering in our separate beds. It was the same with hunger, with illness, with fear. Ona was Corydon, speaking Lithuanian but otherwise unchanged. Our little boy was down with pneumonia that winter, and nearly died, and the grief of that went into the book.

VIII

Three months of incessant work and little exercise put my stomach nearly out of commission. A relative offered me some kind of pass on a steamer to Savannah, and I took this trip, and went on to Florida, and spent a couple of weeks roaming the beaches and fishing in the surf; I came back refreshed, and put in the spring and summer on my task. The story had begun in the _Appeal to Reason_--circulation half a million--and I was getting letters from readers; I realized that this time I had something that would be read. “I am afraid to trust myself to tell you how it affects me,” wrote David Graham Phillips.

Of course I had some human life during that year. There were times when the country was beautiful; when the first snow fell, and again when the peach orchard turned pink, the pear orchard white, and the apple orchard pink and white. We had a vegetable garden, and had not yet discovered that it cost us more than buying the vegetables. We bought some goose eggs, hatched a flock of eight or ten, and chased them all over the countryside until one day they disappeared into the stomachs of the foxes or the Jukeses. I worked on the place all my spare time in summer and became a jack-of-all-trades. I drove a hayrake, which was picturesque and romantic--except that the clouds of pollen dust set me to sneezing my head off. I was continually catching cold in those days, and was still at the stage where I went to doctors, and let them give me pills and powders, and pump my nose full of red and blue and green and yellow-colored liquids, which never had the slightest effect that I could discover.

Shortly before the completion of the book, I set to work at the launching of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. I had reflected much upon my education in college and university, and made sure that my ignorance of the modern revolutionary movement had not been an accident. Since the professors refused to teach the students about modern life, it was up to the students to teach themselves; so I sent a circular letter to all the college socialists I knew of and invited them to organize. On September 12, 1905, we had a dinner at Peck’s Restaurant on Fulton Street in New York, and chose Jack London as our president. The newspapers gave three or four inches to the doings of this peculiar set of cranks. I remember calling up the secretary of some university club to ask for the membership list, and I could not make him understand the strange name of our organization. “Intercollegiate _Socialist_ Society, you say?” The Catholic Anarchist League, the Royal Communist Club, the Association of Baptist Bolsheviks!

We had no income, of course, and everything was done by volunteer labor. Many times I sat up until two or three in the morning, wrapping packages of literature to be mailed to persons who did not always want them and sometimes wrote to say so. One who attended our first meeting was a young student at Wesleyan by the name of Harry Laidler, and for several years it was my dream that some day we might have an income of eighteen dollars per week so that Harry could be our full-time secretary. The organization, now known as the League for Industrial Democracy, has not merely Harry W. Laidler but Norman Thomas also, and has raised about fifty thousand dollars a year. Not so much, compared with the resources of the power trust, but we have interested and trained two generations of socialists, progressives, and liberals. The league has been at the same address, 112 East 19th Street, New York, for some fifty-five years--in itself an achievement; if you want to know about it, send a postcard.

Soon after our start, we organized a mass meeting at Carnegie Hall at which the principal speaker was to be Jack London. I had corresponded with him from the time of his first novel. At this time he had had his great success with _The Sea Wolf_. He was on the crest of the wave of glory and a hero in the movement of social protest. He was traveling from California to Florida by sea, then by train to New York, and he was due to arrive on the very evening of the meeting. His train was late, and I had been asked to keep the crowd entertained until he arrived. The hall was packed. I was in something of a panic because I didn’t think that I was equal to the assignment. But just as I started for the platform, a roar of cheers broke out--our hero and his wife were walking down the aisle.

Jack was not much taller than I, but he was broadly built--the picture of an athlete. That night he gave us the substance of his famous discourse, “Revolution,” later published in a little red paper pamphlet. The crowd that listened so raptly was not, I must admit, very collegiate. A few students came, but most of the audience was from the Lower East Side; the ushers were Jewish boys and girls wearing red badges. The socialist fervor of that evening now seems like even more ancient history than it is. A good part of it went into the communist movement, of course, and my friend Scott Nearing used to ask me how I could continue to belong to the Socialist Party, made up of lawyers and retired real-estate speculators!

IX

The first chapters of _The Jungle_ had been read by George P. Brett of the Macmillan Company, who was impressed by the book, and gave me an advance of five hundred dollars. The last chapters were not up to standard, because both my health and my money were gone, and a second trip to Chicago, which I had hoped to make, was out of the question. I did the best I could--and those critics who didn’t like the ending ought to have seen it as it was in manuscript! 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. I submitted these chapters to a test and got a cruel verdict; the editor of the _Appeal_ came to visit me, and sat in my little living room one evening to hear the story--and fell sound asleep! The polite author went on reading for an hour or so, hoping that his guest would wake up and be spared the embarrassment of being “caught!” (I cut the material out.)

I was called to New York for an interview with Mr. Brett. He wanted me to cut out some of the “blood and guts” from the book; nothing so horrible had ever been published in America--at least not by a respectable concern. Brett had been a discerning but somewhat reserved critic of my manuscripts so far; if I had taken his advice, I would have had an easier time in life--but I would have had to be a different person. Out of his vast publishing experience he now assured me that he could sell three times as many copies of my book if I would only consent to remove the objectionable passages; if I were unwilling to do this, his firm would be compelled to decline the book. I remember taking the problem to Lincoln Steffens, an older muckraker than I. Said he: “It is useless to tell things that are incredible, even though they may be true.” But I could not take his advice; I had to tell the truth, and let people make of it what they could.

I forget who were the other publishers that turned down _The Jungle_. There were five in all; and by that time I was raging and determined to publish it myself. The editor of the _Appeal_ generously consented to give space to a statement of my troubles. Jack London wrote a rousing manifesto, calling on the socialist movement to rally to the book, which he called “the _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ of wage slavery. It is alive and warm. It is brutal with life. It is written of sweat and blood, and groans and tears.” I offered a “Sustainer’s Edition,” price $1.20, postpaid, and in a month or two I took in four thousand dollars--more money than I had been able to earn in all the past five years. Success always went to my head, and I became drunk, thinking it was going to be like that the rest of my life; and so I could found a colony, or start a magazine, or produce a play, or win a strike--whatever might be necessary to change the world into what it ought to be.

In this case the first thing I did was to buy a saddle horse for a hundred and twenty-five dollars. It wasn’t as reckless as it sounds because the horse could also be driven to the buggy, and I had to have some form of exercise to help the poor stomach that apparently was not equal to keeping up with the head. Also I had to have some way to get into town quickly, because I now had a business on my hands and had to be sending telegrams and mailing proofs. I had a printing firm in New York at work putting _The Jungle_ into type. Then, just as the work was completed, someone suggested that I offer the book to Doubleday, Page and Company. So I found myself in New York again, for a series of conferences with Walter H. Page and his young assistants.

This publisher and editor played an important part in American history, so I will tell what I saw of him. He was extremely kind and extremely naïve; being good himself, he believed that other people were good; and just as he was swallowed alive by Balfour and other British Tories during World War I, so he was very nearly swallowed by the Chicago packers. Anxious not to do anybody harm in such a good and beautiful world, he submitted the proofs of _The Jungle_ to James Keeley, managing editor of the Chicago _Tribune_ and a highly honorable gentleman, who sent back a thirty-two page report on the book, prepared, so Keeley avowed, by one of his reporters, a disinterested and competent man. I sat down to a luncheon with the firm, at which this report was produced, and I talked for two or three hours, exposing its rascalities. I persuaded the firm to make an investigation of their own, and so they sent out a young lawyer, and the first person this lawyer met in the yards was a publicity agent of the packers. The lawyer mentioned _The Jungle_, and the agent said, “Oh, yes, I know that book. I read the proofs of it and prepared a thirty-two page report for James Keeley of the _Tribune_.”

X

The young lawyer’s report upheld me, so Doubleday, Page agreed to bring out the book, allowing me to have a simultaneous edition of my own to supply my “sustainers.” The book was published in February 1906, and the controversy started at once. The answer of the packers appeared in a series of articles by J. Ogden Armour in the _Saturday Evening Post_, whose editor was Armour’s former secretary, George Horace Lorimer. The great packer did not condescend to name any book, but he referred in dignified fashion to the unscrupulous attacks upon his great business, which was noble in all its motives and turned out products free from every blemish. I remember reading this canned literature in Princeton, and thinking it over as I rode my new saddle horse back to the farm. I was boiling, and automatically my material began to sort itself out in my mind. By the time I got home, I had a reply complete, and sat down and wrote all through the night; the next morning I had an eight-thousand-word magazine article, “The Condemned Meat Industry.”

I took the first train for New York, and went to _Everybody’s Magazine_, which had just electrified the country with Thomas W. Lawson’s exposure of Wall Street methods. I figured they would be looking for something new, and I asked to see the publisher of the magazine--realizing that this was a matter too important to be decided by a mere editor. I saw E. J. Ridgway and told him what I had, and he called in his staff of editors. I read them the article straight through and it was accepted on the spot, price eight hundred dollars. They stopped the presses on which the May issue of the magazine was being printed, and took out a story to make room for mine. Two lawyers were summoned, and once more I had to go over my material line by line, and justify my statements.

It was dynamite, no mistake. Bob Davis, of _Munsey’s Magazine_--how I blessed him for it!--had introduced me to a wild, one-eyed Irishman who had been a foreman on Armour’s killing beds and had told under oath the story of how the condemned carcasses, thrown into the tanks to be destroyed, were taken out at the bottom of the tanks and sold in the city for meat. The Armours had come to him, and offered him five thousand dollars to retract his story; by advice of a lawyer he accepted the money and put it in the bank for his little daughter, and then made another affidavit, telling how he had been bribed and why. I had both these affidavits; also I had the court records of many pleas of guilty that Mr. Armour and his associates had entered in various states to the charge of selling adulterated meat products. It made a marvelous companion piece to Mr. Armour’s canned literature in the _Saturday Evening Post_.

The article in _Everybody’s_ was expected to blow off the roof. But alas, it appeared on the newsstands on April 20, and April 19 was the date selected by the Maker of History for the destruction of San Francisco by earthquake and fire. So the capitalist news agencies had an excuse for not sending out any stories about “The Condemned Meat Industry!” I have met with that sort of misfortune several times in the course of my efforts to reach the public. In 1927 I traveled all the way across the continent in order to make war on the city of Boston for the suppression of my novel, _Oil!_; and just as I set to work, Lindbergh landed in America after his flight to France! For a couple of weeks there was nothing in the American newspapers but the “lone eagle” and the advertisements.

XI

However, _The Jungle_ made the front page a little later, thanks to the efforts of the greatest publicity man of that time, Theodore Roosevelt. For the utilizing of Roosevelt in our campaign, credit was claimed by Isaac F. Marcosson, press agent for Doubleday, Page and Company, in his book, _Adventures in Interviewing_. If I dispute his exclusive claim, it is because both of us sent copies of the book to the President, and both got letters saying that he was investigating the charges. (Roosevelt’s secretary later told me that he had been getting a hundred letters a day about _The Jungle_.) The President wrote to me that he was having the Department of Agriculture investigate the matter, and I replied that that was like asking a burglar to determine his own guilt. If Roosevelt really wanted to know anything about conditions in the yards, he would have to make a secret and confidential investigation.

The result was a request for me to come to Washington. I was invited to luncheon at the White House, where I met James R. Garfield, Francis E. Leupp, and one or two other members of the “tennis cabinet.” We talked about the packers for a while; said “Teddy”: “Mr. Sinclair, I bear no love for those gentlemen, for I ate the meat they canned for the army in Cuba.” Presently he fell to discussing the political situation in Washington. At this time _Cosmopolitan_ was publishing a series of articles called “The Treason of the Senate,” by the novelist David Graham Phillips, which revealed the financial connections and the reactionary activities of various Senators. (The articles were basically sound, though I had the impression that Phillips, whom I knew rather well, was longer on adjectives than on facts.) The President called the roll of these traitors, and told me what he knew about each one. I sat appalled--what, after all, did Theodore Roosevelt know about me? I was a stranger, a young socialist agitator, from whom discretion was hardly to be expected; yet here was the President of the United States discussing his plans and policies, and pouring out his rage against his enemies--not even troubling to warn me that our talk was confidential.

I was so much amused by his language that when I left the White House, the first thing I did was to write out, while I remembered it, his words about Senator Hale of Maine, whom he called “the Senator from the Shipbuilding Trust.” If you want to get the full effect of it, sit at a table, clench your fist, and hit the table at every accented syllable: “The most in-_nate_-ly and es-_sen_-tial-ly mal-_e_-vo-lent _scoun_-drel that _God_ _Almight_-_y_ _ev_-er _put_ on _earth_!” I perceived after this session the origin of what the newspapermen of Washington called “the Ananias Club.” I was assumed to know that the President’s words were not meant to be quoted; and if I broke the rule, “Teddy” would say I was a liar, and the club would have a new member.

A curious aspect of this matter: it was only a few weeks later that Roosevelt made his famous speech denouncing the “muckrakers.” The speech named no names but was generally taken to refer to David Graham Phillips on account of his “Treason of the Senate” articles; and this gave great comfort to the reactionaries. Yet Phillips in his wildest moment never said anything against the Old Guard senators more extreme than I had heard Roosevelt say with his own lips at his own luncheon table. Needless to say, this experience did not increase my respect for the game of politics as played in America.

I was sent to see Charles P. Neill, labor commissioner, and James Bronson Reynolds, a settlement worker, the two men who had been selected to make the “secret and confidential” investigation. I talked matters out with them, promised silence, and kept the promise. But when I got back to Princeton, I found a letter from Chicago telling me it was known that the President was preparing an investigation of the yards and that the packers had men working in three shifts, day and night, cleaning things up. I found also waiting for me a business gentleman with dollar signs written all over him, trying to interest me in a proposition to establish an independent packing company and market my name and reputation to the world. This gentleman haunted my life for a month, and before he got through he had raised his bid to three hundred thousand dollars in stock. I have never been sure whether it was a real offer, or a well-disguised attempt to buy me. If it was the latter, it would be the only time in my life this had happened; I suppose I could consider that I had been complimented.

XII