Upton Sinclair by Floyd Dell

I.

Once back in America, Sinclair was inevitably drawn into the field of agitation. From a winter in Bermuda, where he had written _Sylvia's Marriage_, he returned to investigate the coal strike then going on in Colorado. It was a sufficiently dramatic episode in our industrial history; eleven thousand miners, with their wives and children, on strike and evicted from company-owned homes, were living in tent-colonies that had been raided and shot up by gun-men -- and finally machine-guns had been turned on them, their tent-colony at Ludlow had been burned, and three women and fourteen children had been suffocated to death. Yet this news was being published only, with the most rare and meager exceptions, in the Socialist papers. Sinclair resolved to break this conspiracy of silence. Being convinced that John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was personally responsible for the tactics of the mine-owners, he went to Mr. Rockefeller's office and asked that he meet and talk with an eyewitness of the barbarities with which the strike was being repressed. The interview was denied. Then Sinclair hit on the idea of inviting a group of people to put bands of crêpe around their arms and walk in silence up and down in front of 26 Broadway, the Rockefeller offices, in token of mourning for the dead women and children of Ludlow. Picketing, except in labor strikes, was then a new publicity device, though the suffragists afterward made it familiar. Reporters were informed of the plan, and were on hand next morning when the demonstration began, together with a great crowd. There were also policemen, who told the pickets to go away. They replied that what they were doing was not unlawful, and continued. They were then arrested. They were followed by reporters to the police station, and Sinclair was there interviewed. He explained the purpose of the demonstration, and told the entire story of the Colorado coal strike. Within a few hours the newspapers were on the street with the story emblazoned on the front page, with three or four columns of news of the strike, as contained in the interview. The device had been successful: the conspiracy of silence was broken.