Upton Sinclair by Floyd Dell

I.

Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland, September 20th, 1878. His father was one of the Norfolk Sinclairs, his mother one of the Baltimore Hardens. That is to say, he was by ancestry and birth a Southerner. His childhood, moreover -- until his tenth year, when his family moved to New York City -- was spent in the very Southern atmosphere of Baltimore. This background is so alien to the theme of modern American industrialism as to arouse a wonder and provoke a question: How did this child of the South ever come to write _The Jungle_?

For the South of his childhood had a history of its own, sufficiently different from that of the factory-building North. It is true that Baltimore, an important seaport in close proximity to coal mines, had already begun its industrial career; but the relations of capital and labor presented so far no tragic problems of which a little boy would hear. And such vague rumors as might have reached the child in Baltimore of the "labor troubles" up North -- the strike in Chicago at the McCormick reaper works, the agitation for an eight-hour day, the Haymarket riot, and the hanging of the Chicago "Anarchists" -- could have made no deep impression on his young consciousness.[1] He was living in another world than that. It was the world of an aristocracy ruined by the Civil War and struggling to regain its place in the sun.

II.

The Sinclairs of Norfolk had been a navy family. Before the first Sinclair came to America, there had been Sinclairs in the British navy. A Sinclair had commanded a frigate in the American navy in the War of 1812.[2] His son had followed him into the navy, and had been in command of one of the ships of Commodore Perry in the famous expedition of 1852-54 which "opened up" Japan. But in 1861, this officer had had to make a disastrous choice of loyalties. There was a story which was a part of the Sinclair family tradition, about the two old sea-dogs who sat up all one April night in Norfolk, arguing out their duty and their destinies. One was Lieutenant Commander Arthur Sinclair, the boy Upton's grandfather; the other was his old friend and shipmate, Captain David Farragut. Both were Southerners, both Virginians -- and Virginia had that day seceded from the Union. They argued all night in Sinclair's study and in the morning Farragut went North to offer his services to President Lincoln -- while Sinclair stayed to fight for the South.[3] History preserves the name of Farragut as the commander of the victorious squadron which captured New Orleans and Mobile and sealed the South within a fatal blockade. Sinclair's further career is recorded only in the obscure annals of the defeated Confederacy. He commanded a blockade-runner which was sunk in a storm off the coast of England, carrying him to his death, and his body was buried in a churchyard at Hull.

His family's history was henceforth united with that of the lost cause. His eldest son had served four years under his father in the U. S. navy; he went into the Confederate navy, burned his ship to prevent its capture by Farragut at Mobile, was an officer on the blockade-runner _Alabama_ which was finally sunk in English waters, survived to write a book about it, and died in poverty in a Soldiers' and Sailors' Home. Another son was also in the Confederate navy, and, more fortunate, lived to adorn New York society. Still another, Upton Beall Sinclair, who was to become the father of the novelist, was too young to see much of the fighting, though he took a gun and ran away from home to help in the final defense of the Confederate capital, Richmond. The Sinclairs, along with all the rest of the South, were ruined, at least until they could successfully adapt themselves to new conditions. During the "reconstruction" period, when Southern affairs were run by "carpetbagger" politicians from the North with the aid of the votes of Negro freedmen, they were no longer members of the ruling class, with a prescriptive right to places of power and pride. They had to make their livings as best they could.

Moreover it would be a long time before the cotton and tobacco industries adjusted themselves comfortably to the new wage-labor system. Slavery was gone, and the old aristocratic ease only a sentimental memory. But the South loved its memories, bitter as they were -- and drinking, that generous accompaniment of the old aristocratic ease, became an important solace of the harassed post-war period. Even if the proud womenfolk of the South got up stealthily in the dead of night to wash the doorsteps and perform other menial tasks, thus honorably concealing their poverty, there was always money for the menfolk to spend on good whiskey. The liquor trade thrived in the ruined South. And so it was that Upton B. Sinclair became a wholesale liquor salesman.

The young salesman's business took him to Baltimore, and there he met and married Priscilla Harden, daughter of the secretary and treasurer of the Western Maryland railroad. Maryland, violently Southern in its sympathies -- so much so that the first blood of the Civil War was shed there when a mob resisted the passage of Northern regiments on their way to Washington -- had nevertheless been kept within the Union by force of arms. It had not suffered with the rest of the South the rigors of blockade; and though it had endured the inconvenience of military occupation, it had not been devastated by invasion and battle, and it was able to share to some considerable extent in the economic growth and prosperity of the North after the war. The Hardens were moderately rich; and one of Priscilla's sisters had married a Baltimore banker named Bland, who presently founded the United States Fidelity and Guaranty Company, and became a millionaire many times over.