Political animal

UPTON SINCLAIR lived a life of almost cartoonish excitements. He was born in Baltimore in 1878, the frail son of parents whose wealth was fading. In 1888, the family headed to New York and, as Anthony Arthur relates in his fine new biography, “Radical Innocent,” the Sinclairs lived hand to mouth, “sliding steadily downwards through a series of boarding houses that catered to displaced southerners like themselves.” This abrupt transformation in fortune puzzled the young Sinclair, who later wrote that he encountered “drunkenness,” “debauchery scarcely hidden” and “jealousy, and base snobbery, and raging spite.” Useful for any writer, especially the sort he would become.

Sinclair put himself through City College of New York, and helped support his parents, by writing humorous filler for newspapers and magazines, making fun of “drunken Irishmen, tightfisted Scots, lazy tramps, shrewish wives, henpecked husbands.” In this, his early career recalls that of Anton Chekhov, a writer in so many other ways his exact opposite. Both men taught themselves, and saved their families, by learning from the simplest and most commercial formulas. Both made the conscious and determined effort to become literary craftsmen of the top rank. Both became famous -- living emblems in their respective cultures. But that’s where the similarities stop.

Chekhov came, rightly or wrongly, to represent a very Russian inwardness, whereas Sinclair threw himself at projects like they were battles to be won. Arthur’s unpretentious account turns this into a prototypical American story, full of ambition, achievement and wrong turns. Initially, Sinclair produced dime novels in the Horatio Alger style, then a loony mythic allegory, “Prince Hagen,” set in the world of the Nibelungs made famous by Wagner. “It is like a barrelful of rats -- there is only a certain number that can keep on top, and the rest must sweat for it till they die,” he wrote in that novel. He’d found a theme but had yet to locate the appropriate framing vision.

Such a vision arrived through the unlikeliest of mentors, Gaylord Wilshire, a Harvard dropout who made a fortune out of real estate on the Los Angeles boulevard that bears his name. Wilshire was an eccentric, charismatic figure and a socialist. Together with George Herron, a university professor fired for adultery and tortured by the press as a “freethinker,” he pressed upon Sinclair the works of Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen. The job at hand, Sinclair came to believe, was the bloodless overthrow of capitalism, and since print was the dominant medium of the age, the pen and the typewriter could be mighty weapons. He joined the likes of Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell in supporting the rights of workers against what they saw as the cruelty of the American money-making machine.

The chapters in “Radical Innocent” that describe the research and writing of “The Jungle” -- the most famous and still the most powerful of all the muckraking novels -- are thrilling. Sinclair chose the Chicago stockyards as his setting and headed west to expose the meatpacking industry. “Hello! I’m Upton Sinclair!” he proclaimed. “And I’ve come here to write the ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of the Labor Movement.” Arthur captures nicely Sinclair’s almost absurd innocence, his boundless enthusiasm as he met journalists, welfare workers, labor organizers and the men and women who worked in the slaughterhouses. He realized he could attack injustice through the eyes of its victims.

In “The Jungle,” Sinclair piles misfortune Job-like on the shoulders of his hero, Jurgis Rudkus. Foremen abuse him. Real estate sharks fleece him. His wife is raped and later dies. He journeys through several other circles of urban hell before arriving at the grail of socialism. It’s crude stuff, like a lecture in many places, but the best passages are deadpan and concrete, burning with an undiminished anger that still produces a flinch, a wince, a creeping of the flesh. “One by one they hooked up the hogs,” Sinclair writes, “and one by one with a swift stroke they slit their throats. There was a long line of hogs, with squeals and lifeblood ebbing away together; until at last each started again, and vanished with a splash into a huge vat of boiling water.” The joke among the meatpackers was that the company used everything in the hog except its squeal. “The man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one -- there were things that went into a sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.”

The book found its way to Doubleday, Page -- publishers of Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris. I would have liked to have seen more on Sinclair’s relationship to those writers, an area covered brilliantly in Alfred Kazin’s “On Native Ground.” Arthur, though, largely steers clear of analysis, focusing instead on the impact of “The Jungle,” which was a sensation from the moment it appeared, on Feb. 26, 1906. Like Byron, the obscure Sinclair awoke to find himself famous. He was called to meet the president, Theodore Roosevelt, though the effect of the hullabaloo was not as sweeping as Sinclair had wished. Roosevelt pushed for the speedy passage of the Pure Food Act, but before long was saying, “Tell Sinclair to go home and let me run the country for awhile.”

Arthur never pokes fun at his subject, tempting though this might have been. Sinclair, after all, could be irritating and humorless, proclaiming that his three greatest influences were Jesus, Hamlet and Shelley. Yet Arthur admires, in a distanced if unironic way, the almost dotty purity of Sinclair, who, after the publication of “The Jungle,” was affronted by, and spurned, an offer to front a meatpacking company that would have made him a millionaire. Instead, he took his royalties and formed a colony for young rebels in New Jersey. It burned down. He continued his crusade in print, cranking out millions of words, books about health and food, his failing marriage, and further novels attacking financial and industrial institutions. Nothing came close to the success of “The Jungle.”

In 1915, Sinclair moved to California and, a year later, settled with his second wife in Pasadena. He was a health nut, faddish about his food, who believed in telepathy and spirits. He was arrested for supporting the Wobblies in Long Beach. He helped form the Southern California chapter of the ACLU and ran for governor and the Senate. He nudged Sinclair Lewis, Louis Adamic and Mike Gold into print and mentored Charlie Chaplin. He had little writerly interest in mood or landscape, and yet in 1927 he produced one of the great Los Angeles novels, “Oil!,” drawing upon the scandals of the era -- the Julian Pete stock balloon, the saga surrounding Edward Doheny and the Elk Hills Naval Petroleum Reserve -- to create a sweeping panorama of a corrupt town gone oil mad.

Sinclair’s finest hour may have been the End Poverty in California!, or EPIC, campaign and his second run for governor, in 1934. “I say there is no excuse for poverty in a civilized and wealthy State like ours. I say that we can and should see to it that all men and women of our State who are willing to work should have work suited to their capacities,” he wrote, and his utopianism struck a deep chord. The California establishment, led by such men as Harry Chandler, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg -- Arthur details the latter’s role deftly -- orchestrated a counter-blitz of vicious redbaiting. In the end, Sinclair lost, narrowly, but a new kind of politics, mixing celebrity and the media smear, had been ushered in.

This part of the Sinclair story has been treated in greater detail, and with more urgent drama, in Greg Mitchell’s “Campaign of the Century.” For Arthur, however, Sinclair’s vanity, and in particular a wild misreading of his relationship with Franklin D. Roosevelt, were also crucial factors in the defeat. FDR needed the warriors of the left; equally, he was determined to save capitalism, and Sinclair didn’t reckon on the president’s pragmatism. It’s an interesting point, but in some sense Arthur overstates his case. After all, America’s very nature doomed EPIC to failure; the forces of money and power would conspire to crush it, whatever Sinclair did. The miracle was that his improbable campaign came so close to success.

It’s been awhile since anybody wrote a full-blown study of Sinclair, and although “Radical Innocent” sometimes lacks scope, it comes across as pleasingly modest and often witty. Arthur doesn’t linger over local historical detail, and I think he gives too much credit to Sinclair’s later novels, but his is a subject that presents any prospective biographer with one considerable difficulty. Sinclair ultimately became a recluse while remaining productive for decades. He didn’t go out with a bang, nor did he ever quite fade away. In 1967, in ripe old age, he was meeting with yet another president, Lyndon B. Johnson, when Johnson signed the Wholesome Meat Act.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that there are no second acts in American lives. Sinclair proved that there can be 12 or 15. His talent, as Kazin noted, was the talent for facts; he represents, too, a strain of California radical writing that has, thankfully, never gone away. Sinclair’s energy, as Arthur ably notes, still challenges our complacency.