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In time, she became not Sterling's but Upton Sinclair's goddess. After a messy divorce from his first wife, Sinclair married his belle in 1913. Mary Sinclair still regards it as a matter for wonder that a granddaughter of the Confederacy should have latched onto a radical like Upton. In this wonder lies the secret of the book's charm. She never seems to realize that the romanticism of early Socialism and that of the Old South were akin. However different the windmills they were tilting at, both Mary and Upton were American romantics. Besides, most social reformers are dedicated snobs (Upton himself, claiming kinship with the Duchess of Windsor, wrote a series of articles about her folks).
Freud to Fission. The rest of the book is a wife's-eye view of Upton Sinclair's career, written in a mincing, exclamation-pointed style that sustains the author's fond boast of having been the first student ever to gain a grade of 100 in English at the Mississippi State College for Women. Though Mary Sinclair loyally supports her husband's politics, there is a recurring refrain that goes something like: "I told Uppie not to do it, but he wouldn't listen and so he was arrested again." Sinclair fought John D. Rockefeller Jr. by picketing his Wall Street offices in crape. He bugled for milk, vegetarianism, Prohibition. Sacco and Vanzetti. Yet even a New York Socialist leader said: "Sinclair is an ass." And he never really wrote very well. After a rejected manuscript, according to one anecdote, Mary said sadly: "Why can't you seem to use the right words?"
Uppie's fight against the world was honorable, but his "industrial democracy" is as dead as Eugene Debs. His main battle—against poverty—was won not really by his Socialist martyrs but by the capitalist villains. Nowadays, the Sinclairs live in Monrovia, Calif, and at 79 Uppie is as convinced as ever that he is a power in human affairs. He notes proudly that he is the author of three million books and pamphlets "flowing into every country in the world." He keeps up the old reformer's unreformed habit of issuing letters-to-the-editor on every subject from Freud to fission. He is never discouraged, but even if he were, says Mary, there is always Bernard Shaw's consoling thought to the effect that even Jesus failed.
How will the world get along without Upton Sinclair? Mary wondered about that once. But, said the Sinclair doctor reassuringly: "You should be wondering how Heaven could get along with him."