You don't have to be satisfied with America as you find it. You can change it. So wrote Upton Beall Sinclair of an era that cried out for reform at almost every level of American life. He was a quixotic dreamer, an eccentric, a compulsive dissenter in the intellectual tradition of a Thoreau or a Tom Paine. Yet Sinclair, who died last week at 90 in a New Jersey nursing home, battled so many causes to the finish that the American conscience and the quality of American life were permanently affected by his concern, courage and compassion. And, more than six decades before today's politics of protest and confrontation, Author Sinclair won his crusades with no weapon more lethal than a powerful and prolific pen.
His most celebrated novel was The Jungle, published in 1906, which told the harrowing story of a Lithuanian immigrant worker in Chicago's meat-packing industry. Though Sinclair's main intention was to dramatize the plight of a helpless proletarian, he described the then prevalent filth and brutality of the industry in shockingly graphic terms. The Jungle, turned down by five publishers before Doubleday, Page & Co. accepted it, was front-page news and an instant bestseller. Meat sales slumped throughout the U.S. Within months, Congress passed the nation's first pure-foods law and required more than cursory federal meat inspection. Said Sinclair: "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."
Pizened Sausages. Finley Peter Dunne's fictional humorist, the Irish bartender Mr. Dooley, imagined the scene when President Theodore Roosevelt first read The Jungle: "Tiddy was toying with a light breakfast an' idly turnin' over th' pages iv th' new book with both hands. Suddenly he rose fr'm th' table, an' cryin': 'I'm pizened,' begun throwin' sausages out iv th' window." Author Sinclair lunched at the White House with T.R., though presumably not on sausages. The President later wrote Sinclair's publisher: "Tell Sinclair to go home and let me run the country for a while."
The Jungle is a classic of American social reform, and it put Sinclair first in the company of early 20th century muckrakers: Frank Norris (The Octopus, The Pit), Ida Tarbell (The History of the Standard Oil Company), and Jack London (The War of the Classes). Sinclair started a short-lived Utopian community in New Jersey, called the Helicon Home Colony, with the $30,000 he earned from The Jungle.
Every Injustice. Sinclair came from a shabby-genteel Maryland family, absorbing from that background both a breadth of interests and a sympathy for other havenots. He helped support himself in college by peddling jokes to newspapers for $1 each. He ground out several pulp novels before The Jungle, and he read even faster than he wrote: in one two-week Christmas holiday, he got through all of Shakespeare's plays and Milton's poetry.
Then he came to socialism, with a convert's religious fervor. After The Jungle, he turned out millions of words of social criticism attacking every injustice he saw: a corrupt press (The Brass