Part 20

My aim that winter was to write a novel called _King Coal_, dealing with those labor camps in the Rocky Mountains about which I had learned so much. The first essential for my work was quiet, and the way to get it was to have a tent at a corner of the property remote from the house. A tent must have a platform, so I ordered the necessary lumber and set to work. Nobody at Ashton Hall, white or black, had ever seen a white “gentleman” doing such work, and I damaged my reputation thereby. A colored boy helped me to get the tent up, since that couldn’t be done alone. I built a little doorframe for the front and tacked on mosquito netting.

Thereafter, when the wind brought mosquitoes, my technique was as follows: I would dart out from the big house, run as fast as my feet could take me to the tent, brush off the mosquitoes that had already attached themselves, dart inside and fasten the door, then with a flyswat proceed to eliminate all the mosquitoes inside. The size of the tent was eight by ten; so I had three steps east and then three steps west while I thought up the next scene in my story. I would sit down and write for a while on the typewriter, then get up and walk and think some more. So, in the end I had _King Coal_.

The Judge came from Greenwood now and then and took me fishing--always with a Negro man to row the boat and bait our hooks. Brother Willie Kimbrough came, a big laughing stout man, and took me to catch pompano in what was called Back Bay, a sort of deep sound.

Craig’s sister Dolly, back from England, came to stay with us; Craig, who disapproved of idleness, assigned her a job. Behind the house stood an enormous arbor of scuppernong grapes, loaded with ripe fruit that it would be a shame to waste. So Dolly put two Negro boys to picking grapes. When they had two big baskets full, they would take them to the trolley, and Dolly would ride into town and arrange with a grocery to buy them. Never before had an occupant of Ashton Hall engaged in trade, and Dolly wept once or twice, then became interested in making pocket money.

Everything was going beautifully, and if it went wrong there was someone to attend to it. I made the mistake of leaving my small possessions, such as fountain pen and cuff links, on my bureau, and one by one these objects disappeared. After searching everywhere I mentioned the matter to the youthful Hunter, who knew exactly what to do. He called a Negro boy, one of the house servants, and said with due sternness, “Empty your pockets.” Sure enough, the boy proceeded to shell out all my possessions. Hunter didn’t say, “I’ll call the police.” He said, “Now, you keep out of Mr. Sinclair’s room; if I ever hear of you being in there again, I’ll skin you alive.” Such was “gov’ment” on the Mississippi Sound. I don’t know how it is now, but I am able to understand both sides in the racial problem.

XIII

Visitors came to see us--among them Captain Jones. I don’t know that I ever heard his first name, but that wasn’t necessary as there was only one “Captain Jones” in that world. He had built the Gulfport harbor, also the railroad that connected Gulfport with the North, and also the trolley line that paralleled the road in front of Ashton Hall and carried me into town when I wanted to play tennis at Captain Jones’s Great Southern Hotel.

The old gentleman and his wife came to Ashton Hall, and he poured out his heart to us. He was probably the richest man in Mississippi; but nobody loved him, nobody wanted anything but money from him, and some of their ways were wicked and cruel. His railroad, which ran through the desolate “piney woods” of southern Mississippi, was a blessing to everybody along the way; but the miserable piney-woods people, “clayeaters” as they were called, had only one thought--to plunder Captain Jones’s railroad. They would cut the wire fence that protected both sides of the track and turn some scrawny old cow onto the railroad right of way; when the creature was struck and killed by a train, they would demand the price of a prize bull in a cattle show.

I was duly sympathetic, of course, and was somewhat embarrassed when a strike of the dockworkers developed in Captain Jones’s Gulfport. He had made all the prosperity of that town, and here was one more case of ingratitude. It was embarrassing to me and to the Kimbrough family when the strikers sent a deputation to ask me to speak at a meeting in the largest hall in Gulfport. I had never refused an invitation from strikers, and I wasn’t going to begin at the age of thirty-six. I told them I couldn’t discuss their particular issues because I didn’t know the circumstances and didn’t have time to investigate them; but I would tell them my ideas of democracy in industry, otherwise known as socialism, where strikes would be unnecessary because workers would be striking against themselves.

The meeting was duly announced, and the Kimbrough family were too polite to tell me what they thought about the matter. What the wife of Captain Jones thought about it surprised both Craig and me. She called us up and said she would be glad to go to the meeting with us; and would we come to the Great Southern Hotel and have dinner with her before the meeting? Of course we said we would be pleased.

It was Craig’s practice to sit in the very back of a hall, where she would be inconspicuous and if possible unrecognized. But Mrs. Jones wouldn’t have it that way. She took me by an arm and Craig by an arm, and marched us straight down the center aisle to the front seats in the hall so that everybody would know who had brought us. I have had a number of experiences like that with the very rich, and they have encouraged me to realize that democracy is a real force in America.

XIV

So everything seemed lovely at Ashton Hall, until one tragic day when the roof fell in on us--the moral and spiritual roof. My former wife saw fit to come to Gulfport and bring a lawsuit for the custody of our son. I cannot shirk the telling of this story because it played an enormous part in my life and Craig’s; but I tell it as briefly and tactfully as possible. I don’t think the lady actually wanted David, but the grandmother did. My former wife is still living, has been married twice, and has children and grandchildren whom I have no desire to hurt. Suffice it to say that her coming created a scandal in Gulfport--one that not even the wife of Captain Jones could mitigate.

David was with us at the time, and I had a secretary, a young man from the North, who considered it a great lark to carry the lad off into the woods and hide him from the courts of Mississippi for a few days. There was a trial with plenty of publicity; the court, presided over by a Catholic judge, awarded six months’ custody to me and six months’ to his mother. To make the painful story short, I took David to California for the first six months; and when the time came for his mother to come and get him, I heard nothing from her--then or afterward.

Judge Kimbrough had made Craig an offer promising her Ashton Hall if she would live there. It was said to be worth a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and with the development that has come in the past thirty or forty years, the lot alone is probably worth that now. But we couldn’t be happy there. A friend had told me about the wonders of southern California, where there were no mosquitoes. I begged Craig to come, and I went ahead to find a home.

_10_

_West to California_

I

It was November of 1915. I wanted to be warm so I went as far south as possible, to Coronado; but it proved not to be so warm. Cold winds blew off the wide Pacific, and the little cottage I rented leaked both wind and rain. I pasted newspapers inside to keep out the wind--which was not very ornamental.

Craig was wretchedly unhappy over the humiliation she had brought to her family, and only time could heal that wound. She told me long afterward that she hadn’t been sure she would follow me to California; but her father, who had labored so hard to keep us apart, now kept us together. He said, “Daughter, you must go to your husband.” She came, and we had a hard time because George P. Brett of Macmillan rejected _King Coal_. It was a painful, a terrible subject, and I had failed to make the characters convincing. Craig, who agreed with him, wrote to him telling him her ideas and offering to make me revise the manuscript accordingly. Brett said he would read the manuscript again after she had finished.

You can imagine what a hold that gave her in our family arguments. The heroine of my story was a daughter of the mining camps named Mary Burke. I had failed to describe what she looked like; Craig sought in vain to find out from me, because I didn’t know. Likewise, Craig insisted that Mary Burke was naked, and thereafter for the rest of our lives the revision of my manuscripts was known as “putting the clothes on Mary Burke.”

Anybody who heard us in that little leaky cottage would have been quite sure we were getting ready for a divorce; but we made an agreement about all our quarrels--whenever one of us got too excited, the other would say “Manuscript,” and the excitement would diminish.

When the rains stopped, I would go out and meet the idle rich, playing tennis on the courts of the immense and fashionable Coronado Hotel. Craig would never go; she had met enough rich people to last her the rest of her life. But I had to have characters as well as tennis, and I watched the characters playing at polo and other expensive diversions. I wrote a novel about some of these people that has never yet been published--Craig never got around to putting clothes on the characters.

As far as I can recall we had only one visitor that entire winter. Jane Addams wrote that she wanted to see me, and I was surprised and pleased. I had seen a good deal of her in Chicago because I had had my meals at the University Settlement all the time I was getting material for _The Jungle_. What she had come for now was to ask me about Emanuel Julius. Her niece, Marcet Haldeman, had become engaged to marry him, and what sort of man was he? He was editor of the _Appeal to Reason_ and had been the means of making _The Jungle_ known to the American masses. I am not sure whether I had met him at that time, but I could say that he had a brilliant mind and was, like myself, an ardent socialist.

I may as well complete the story here by saying that the marriage took place; and that after the tragic death of J. A. Wayland, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius bought the _Appeal to Reason_ with his wife’s money and built up a great publishing business, including many hundreds of titles of the five-cent Little Blue Books that did so much to educate America. But, alas, Julius took up with a secretary, and Marcet divorced him. Julius drowned in his swimming pool, and no one knows whether it was a suicide. The good Jane Addams did not live to see these painful events. A son survives, a good friend.

II

We decided that we wanted to get away from ocean winds; and I had met a tennis professional who lived in Pasadena and who assured me I would find plenty of tennis there. So we made the move and found ourselves a brown-painted, two-story house on Sunset Avenue, a remote part of the town. It was covered with a huge vine of red roses, and roses were as important to Craig as tennis was to me.

The house stood on the edge of a slope, with the valley of the Arroyo Seco to the west. It was unfurnished, so Craig would walk several blocks to the streetcar, ride a couple of miles downtown, and then wander about looking for secondhand furniture shops. That way she got three chairs with ragged upholstery for our living room, two beds for upstairs, and packing boxes for tables and bureaus. We were able to do all those things because Brett had accepted _King Coal_ and paid a five-hundred-dollar advance. After that magical achievement, Craig was boss of the family.

Pasadena in the year 1916 was a small town that called itself “City of Roses” and was called by others “City of Millionaires.” These last occupied the wide, elegant Orange Grove Avenue, with palaces on both sides and two very elegant hotels for the winter visitors. We had no thought of the rich, and never expected them to have any thought of us in our humble brown cottage overlooking the sunset. The beautiful roses and the sunsets were enough for Craig, and as for me, I had started _The Coal War_, a sequel to _King Coal_, with more about Mary Burke and her clothes. I had learned now!

But wherever there are millionaires there are also socialists--they are cause and effect. The socialists came to see me and invited me to speak at a meeting in support of a proposed co-operative; of course I went. I had found a woman secretary to type my manuscripts--another necessity of my life--and in the course of the evening this lady came to my wife and whispered a portentous sentence: “Mrs. Gartz wants to meet you.”

“Who is Mrs. Gartz?” asked Craig; and the awe-stricken secretary replied, “Oh, my dear, she is the richest woman in Pasadena.”

Craig said, “Well, bring her here.”

The secretary, dismayed, responded, “She said for you to come to her.”

The secretary didn’t know Craig very well, but she learned about her right there. “If she wants to meet me,” said Craig, “she will come to me.” And that was that.

When the meeting was over, the secretary came back, and with her was a large, magnificent lady of the kind that Craig had known all through her girlhood. The lady was introduced; and, of course, she knew another lady when she met one. More especially, she knew a lovely Southern voice and manner; so she asked if she might come to see us, and Craig said that she might. Craig made no apology for her living room that had only three ragged chairs in it--the biggest one for the large rich lady and the other two for Craig and myself.

Mrs. Kate Crane-Gartz was the elder daughter of Charles R. Crane, plumbing magnate of Chicago, dead then for several years. He had been a newspaper celebrity, not only because he was one of the richest men in America but because he differed from most rich men in being talkative and in voicing original opinions. He was particularly down on college education, insisting that it was all wasteful nonsense. He hadn’t had one himself, and look where he had got!

Mrs. Gartz was an elegant lady with a haughty manner and a tender heart. She had had many sorrows, which we learned about in the course of time. She had lost two of her children in a theater fire in Chicago. She still had a son and a daughter, both of whom she adored, but they gave her little happiness. She had a soft heart and an overfull purse, and she was preyed upon freely--all that we learned soon. But there was one person who would never prey upon her, and that was Mary Craig Sinclair.

III

This new friend was the most curiously frank person we had ever known. She looked around at our new establishment and said, “Why do you live like this?” “We have to,” said Craig, and no more. “Don’t your husband’s books sell?” demanded the visitor. “They have sold in the past,” said Craig, “but he has spent all his money on the socialist movement. He always does that, I’m sorry to say.”

Mrs. Gartz obtained our promise to come and see her, also permission to send her car for us. Then she got into a magnificent limousine and told the uniformed chauffeur to drive her downtown to a furniture store. Early the next morning came a van, and two men unloaded a set of parlor furniture upholstered in blue velvet.

Craig said, “What is this?” One of the men said, “It was ordered. We don’t know anything about it.” Craig said, “I didn’t order it, and I don’t want it. Take it back.”

So it came about that there was one person in Pasadena whom Kate Crane-Gartz could not merely respect but could even stand a bit in awe of. There was one person she would never dare to humiliate, and one who would come to her luncheon parties wearing unfashionable clothing. So it came about that for something like a quarter of a century Mary Craig Sinclair controlled the purse strings of the richest woman in Pasadena.

The main factor in this, I think, was that for the first time in her life Mrs. Gartz met someone whom she regarded as her social equal and possibly her superior. Craig had not only the loveliest Southern voice, but also had gracious manners, wit, and what is called charm. She could keep a roomful of company in continuous laughter. Both men and women would gather around to hear what she had to say. She had taste, and could look lovely in clothes she found on a bargain counter. She had the strangest imaginable combination of haughtiness and kindness. She had a heart that bled for every kind of suffering except that which was deserved. She was a judge of character, and no pretender could ever fool her.

Most important of all, she had come with my help to understand what was wrong with the world--the social system that produces human misery faster than all the charity in the world can relieve it. She had married me partly because I had taught her that, and now she understood the world better than any person whom Kate Crane-Gartz had ever known.

For many years Craig would never take a cent from Mrs. Gartz for herself. “Give it to the co-operative. Give it to the Socialist Party.” For a while Mrs. Gartz was timid about doing that, so she would ask Craig to pass it on, which Craig faithfully did.

The “co-op” had been started by a devoted socialist woman named Tipton, who took in washing while her husband drove a delivery wagon. You can imagine that the first time Mrs. Kate Crane-Gartz showed up at one of the monthly “co-op” bean suppers at the Tipton house it was an event in the history of that City of Millionaires.

Mr. Gartz, who handled his wife’s millions, was not long unaware of these developments. He was beside himself with rage; and when for the first time his wife invited us to a supper party at the fashionable Maryland Hotel, he came into the dining room and stood behind my chair and started muttering abuse in a low tone of voice.

Craig had never had to handle a situation like that, but she was equal to all situations. She got up and invited Mr. Gartz to come over to the next table and speak to her. He obeyed, and she pointed out to him that there was only one possible conclusion the public would draw if he persisted in making a public scene with Upton Sinclair. With that terrible threat she scared him; at the same time, with her lovely Southern voice she calmed him down, and he went his way. Once or twice he raved at me in his home, but I had promised not to answer him, and I obeyed.

That situation continued for a matter of twenty years. The daughter, Gloria, sided with her father, and the son, Craney, sided with his mother. Alas, Craney drank, and when he was drinking he was very generous. To pacify him I would accept his gifts and then return them when he was sober. I once returned a Buick car.

IV

I finished _The Coal War_, a story of the great strike through which I had lived in spirit if not in physical presence; but I never published it, for world war had come and no one was interested in labor problems any more. Mrs. Gartz was a pacifist. A federal agent came to investigate her, and Craig had the job of pacifying _him_. “What I want to know is,” he said, “is she pro-German, or is she just a fool?” Craig assured him that the latter was the case.

Craney became an Air Force officer and traveled around in a blimp looking for German submarines off the Atlantic coast. I resigned from the Socialist Party in order to support the war; and Mrs. Gartz, a pacifist on her son’s account, took a lot of persuading from Craig--who, being a Southerner, had less objection to fighting. At any rate, that was true when the fighting was against the German Kaiser.

My socialist comrades called me bad names for a while, and Craig and Mrs. Gartz argued every time they met. But by that time Craig’s influence had become strong enough to keep Mrs. Gartz from getting into jail. We had a lot of fun laughing over the idea of Kitty--as I had come to call her--misbehaving in a jail. I think even Mr. Gartz appreciated what I was doing, and he no longer growled when he saw me in his home.

In 1918 I started the publication of a little socialist magazine to support the American position in the world war. I called it _Upton Sinclair’s: For a Clean Peace and the Internation_. (Later the slogan became _For Social Justice, by Peaceful Means if Possible_.) For that, Craig felt justified in letting Mrs. Gartz hand her several government bonds. It was amusing the way the great lady argued with us about what was in the magazine, and at the same time helped to keep it going. Some of my socialist and other friends argued with me. They would write me letters of protest against my supporting the war, and I would put the letters in the magazine and reply to them. The more angry the letters were, the more my readers were entertained. All my life I have had fun in controversy.

My position was, of course, to the left of the government. Indeed, Woodrow Wilson was to the left of his own government, and many of his officials didn’t understand his ideas--or disapproved of them when they did understand. When the first issue of the magazine appeared, I applied to the Post Office Department for second-class entry--which was essential, for if I had to pay first-class postage I would be bankrupt at the outset. I had sent copies of the magazine to a number of persons in Washington whom I knew or knew about; and when I got notice that the second-class entry had been refused, I telegraphed to Colonel House. He told me that he was with the President when the telegram was delivered, and he had told the President what was in the magazine and the President approved of it.

As it happened, John Sharp Williams, United States Senator from Mississippi, was Craig’s cousin; in her girlhood she had driven him over the shell roads of the Gulf Coast and learned about politics from his humorous stories. I had sent the magazine to him, of course; and now he wrote that he had read it and had taken up the matter of the second-class entry with Postmaster General Burleson, who was also a Southerner. Burleson had a copy of the magazine with the passages that he considered “subversive” marked. Williams said, “I’ll undertake to read those passages to Woodrow Wilson, and I’ll agree to eat my hat if he doesn’t approve every word of them.”

So it all worked out very nicely. My little magazine got the second-class entry, and Senator Williams of Mississippi went on wearing his hat.

I published, in all, ten issues of that little magazine. The first issue was April 1918; then I had to skip a month because of the delay with second-class entry. The last issue was February 1920. In all, I built up a subscription list of ten thousand, paid for at one dollar per year. I had five secretaries and office girls wrapping and mailing. Mrs. Gartz would come down and argue with Craig and me--she being an out-and-out pacifist. Her attitude was summed up by James Russell Lowell in two lines of verse--

Ez fer war, I call it murder-- There you hev it plain an’ flat.

--although I don’t think Mrs. Gartz had ever heard of _The Biglow Papers_.

V

Like all the other liberals, radicals, and socialists, I was bitterly disappointed by the settlement to which President Wilson consented in Paris. It seemed to us that our hopes had been betrayed, and it seemed to Mrs. Gartz that her seditious opinions had been vindicated. But nothing made any difference in our friendship, or interrupted the flow of checks to help keep the magazine going.