Muckraker’s Own Life as Compelling as His Writing

Overlooking the San Pedro waterfront stands a 9-foot-high bronze and stone pillar marking the site of a historic protest and the place where a muckraking idealist stood his ground.

Eighty years ago this month, Upton Sinclair -- the crusading writer who would go to jail, visit the White House and nearly win the governor’s mansion -- climbed the steps of a platform that striking dockworkers had built atop a hillock they named Liberty Hill.

As someone held a candle for illumination, Sinclair said nothing about the 600 dockworkers who had recently been arrested for striking. He only tried to read the Bill of Rights.

He got as far as the first three lines of the 1st Amendment, the one guaranteeing freedom of speech, before he was arrested. It was a moment that would lead to the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the empowerment of the labor movement.

The country was already in a nervous state, afraid of bomb-flinging anarchists. The Times had been bombed in 1910, killing 20. J.P. Morgan’s Wall Street bank was bombed in 1920; 33 died. A flurry of mail bombs in the late teens and early ‘20s arrived at such places as the homes of John D. Rockefeller and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The government raided suspected Communist Party offices and eventually deported 556 people.

Strikes were usually denounced as communist- inspired. When Los Angeles dockworkers struck in April 1923 for better wages and benefits, the LAPD arrested them -- with help from the Ku Klux Klan.

Sinclair, who was living and working in Pasadena, went to Los Angeles City Hall and asked Mayor George E. Cryer for permission to hold a public meeting.

“Nothing doing,” Cryer replied. Pounding his fist on his desk, he lectured Sinclair and his friends on Americanism. “Too many of the foreigners who come here yap about their constitutional rights and forget their constitutional duties,” Cryer said.

Sinclair told the mayor that he would speak anyway.

So after suppertime May 15, Sinclair climbed Liberty Hill, a piece of private property on Beacon Street. There, among the saloons and drunks that had earned Beacon its reputation as the “toughest street in the world,” Sinclair began to read.

He was arrested by order of Police Chief Louis D. Oaks, a tool of the city’s anti-union business establishment, led by Times publisher Harry Chandler.

(The Times praised the arrests of Sinclair and the dockworkers as “an intensive drive ... to rid the harbor of all loafers and radicals.”)

After Sinclair had been hauled off, his brother-in-law, Hunter Kimbrough, took the platform and began to read the Declaration of Independence. He, too, was arrested.

A third speaker, Prince Hopkins, defended his friends, saying they did not intend “to incite to violence.” He was arrested.

“This is a most delightful climate,” said the fourth man, Hugh Hardyman, who was arrested after that comment on the weather -- or on the political mood.

Sinclair and his colleagues were jailed on “suspicion of criminal syndicalism,” which included advocating violence or terrorism. Chief Oaks told the newspapers that Sinclair was “more dangerous than 4,000 IWW” -- the International Workers of the World Union, or “Wobblies,” to which many of the strikers belonged. Sinclair sent Oaks a letter thanking him for his “compliment.”

“To be dangerous to lawbreakers in office such as yourself is the highest duty that a citizen of this community can perform,” Sinclair wrote.

The police held the foursome incommunicado for 18 hours, hoping to sneak them into court and have them held without bail. But Sinclair’s attorney, John Beardsley, received a tip about their plight and arranged their release. A week later, Sinclair returned to Liberty Hill and spoke to a crowd of 5,000 people. He was not arrested. The same day, the ACLU of Southern California was formed, three years after the national organization was founded.

The next day, all but 28 of the 600 dockworkers were released and the trumped-up charges against Sinclair and his friends were quietly dropped.

The police chief wasn’t so lucky. In August, Oaks was forced to resign after he was discovered in the back seat of a car with a jug of whiskey and a half-naked woman.

Labor unrest continued, as did the vilification of strikers. About a year later, on June 14, 1924, Klan hatred of unions flared again during another strike by dockworkers. Klan raiders broke into the IWW hall in San Pedro and attacked men, women and children. Klansmen grabbed a pot of boiling water from a stove and hurled it at the crowd, badly burning Mae Sundstedt, 13. No arrests were made.

Although both strikes failed and the KKK continued its self-appointed patrol of the waterfront, the IWW grew stronger and attracted more members, laying the foundation for success in the 1930s.

A citizenry suffering through the Great Depression proved far more receptive to Sinclair’s philosophy and, in 1934, he was drawn into politics. With his EPIC campaign -- End Poverty in California -- he won the Democratic nomination for governor.

His candidacy terrified right-wing movie and advertising executives in Los Angeles, who joined hands and checkbooks to quash his expected November victory. Fearing tax increases from a Sinclair administration, film moguls began taking one day’s pay -- $10 to $500 -- from every studio worker, from hairdressers to stars, and donating it to Republican Gov. Frank Merriam’s reelection campaign. When workers complained, executives said Sinclair was a communist and had to be destroyed.

As the election neared and Sinclair’s popularity persisted, MGM produced three faked newsreels linking him with radicals, immigrants, communists and hobos. Days before the election, the films were shown in movie houses across the state. Sinclair’s supporters rioted in the theaters, believing that he had betrayed them, and Merriam was reelected.

But Sinclair’s greatest power resided in his pen. He first shocked the public with the 1906 novel “The Jungle,” which described then-common practices of Chicago meat-packing plants: slaughtering diseased and crippled cattle, often covered with foul-smelling boils; using meat from tubercular steers; mixing spoiled meat with good; using meat covered with rat excrement; and bribing government inspectors to turn a blind eye.

President Theodore Roosevelt was repulsed. He invited Sinclair to the White House for lunch and pushed Congress into passing the nation’s first Pure Food and Drug Act.

Then Roosevelt declared that Sinclair should “go home and let me run the country for a while.”

Years later, Sinclair observed: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

In 1916, Sinclair settled in Pasadena (he lived in various other Southland communities as well at different times). That same year, Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis, who had a virulent hatred for socialists and organized labor, railed in print against Sinclair and his causes. He described the muckraker as “an effeminate young man with a fatuous smile, a weak chin and a sloping forehead.... Never before an audience of red-blooded men could Upton Sinclair have voiced his weak, pernicious, vicious doctrines.”

Sinclair responded in 1919, two years after Otis’ death, with “The Brass Check,” a book about American journalism. He minced no words:

“This paper, founded by Harrison Gray Otis, one of the most corrupt and most violent old men that ever appeared in American public life, has continued for 30 years to rave at every conceivable social reform, with complete disregard for the truth and with abusiveness which seems almost insane. It would seem better to turn loose a hundred thousand mad dogs in the streets of Los Angeles than to send out a hundred thousand copies of The Times every day.”

After his 1934 foray into politics, Sinclair returned to writing. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for his novel “Dragon’s Teeth,” dealing with the horrors of Nazism.

In 1967, 61 years after publication of “The Jungle,” Sinclair was invited back to the White House for the first time since lunching with Teddy Roosevelt. In a wheelchair, spry and courtly, the writer witnessed President Johnson signing the Wholesome Meat Act, which called for tougher government inspections of all slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants.

Sinclair died in 1968 at age 90, with more than 90 books, 29 plays and thousands of stories to his credit.