Upton Sinclair has been in the news lately. And it’s not just the 100th anniversary of The Jungle. Seems the man was a liar.
On December 24, 2005, the Los Angeles Times reported that an Orange County lawyer, Paul Hegness, had bought a box of papers at an auction warehouse for $100. Inside there was a letter postmarked September 12, 1929, in which Upton Sinclair confessed knowing that Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were guilty. He’d been told so by the onetime defense lawyer for the two Italian anarchists who were tried for armed robbery and murder, then executed by the state of Massachusetts in 1927. The defense lawyer, Fred Moore, had let Sinclair in on it. Sinclair poured his guts out, admitting anguish over the ethical quandary of writing a book that could serve the “cause” of making Sacco and Vanzetti into martyrs.
It seemed like a smoking gun, an admission that Sinclair was willing to lie for politics. The letter constituted, the Los Angeles Times intoned, an “exposé.”
But it comes as no surprise to anyone who has spent time, as I have, in the Sinclair archives at Indiana University’s Lilly Library. Nor would it shock anyone who has bothered to read the book that Sinclair wrote about the casea two-volume “contemporary historical novel” called Boston.
Don’t get me wrong. Upton Sinclair was no saint, and it’s impossible to sort out his politics from his self-interest. He was a publicity hound who did whatever necessary to sell his novels, which were often poorly written, sermonizing tracts. But not in the case of Boston, published in 1928. The discovery that Sacco and Vanzetti may not have been innocent led to a nuance often missing from Sinclair’s other books.
Sinclair openly discussed the case with friends in letters found throughout the Lilly Library (all accessible to the public). Uppie, as his friends called him, admitted meeting socialists in Boston who believed “Sacco was guilty and Vanzetti knew it.” He noted “perjury” on both sides of the case. He worried that Sacco possessed books about bomb making. He refused to make the two anarchists into innocents, no matter what his communist friends pleaded.
In Boston, the fictionalized lawyer Lee Swenson openly talks about perjured evidence, much to the frustration of the story’s central idealist, Cornelia Thornwell. But at the same time, Sinclair balances this tale of deceit against the context of a prejudiced Boston aristocracy’s exploiting its hated immigrant labor; Judge Webster Thayer’s referring to Sacco and Vanzetti in public as “anarchist bastards”; and in the “Red Scare” of 1919 and the early 1920s, America’s whipping itself into a frenzy about Bolsheviks overrunning the country. The book suggests that Sacco and Vanzetti, guilty or not, would have had a hard time receiving a fair trial.
Still, none of that has prevented conservatives from having a field day with the newly discovered letter. What’s better than a socialist and realist muck-raker caught in a lie?
In a nationally syndicated column, Jonah Goldberg of the National Review grandstands about the “clay feet of liberal saints.” There’s no mention of the Red Scare or the attitude of Boston’s elite toward immigrants or Judge Thayer’s public remarks — really of anything besides the letter and the assertion that Sinclair “lied.” Goldberg suggests that Sinclair intended to create martyrs, the way future leftists would champion the causes of people now known as guilty — the Rosenbergs, Huey Newton, and even Tawana Brawley.
The Weekly Standard, following Goldberg’s lead, worked itself into a froth about “Upton Sinclair’s Ethics.” It quoted the newly discovered letter in which Sinclair admits his story would make “much better copy as a naïve defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90 percent of my public.” The sentence doesn’t suggest that’s what Sinclair decided to write. But no matter, since, after all, readers of The Weekly Standard know that leftists care about one thing — their bottom line. Sinclair decided to “lie so his fans would keep buying his books,” the editors reason.
Ironic, I thought to myself, hearing the right question the virtue of free markets and sales pitches. If anything, Sinclair was honing a skill now commonplace among capitalists — the practice of segmented, niche marketing. Sinclair consistently built his readership by sending out circulars about the books he pumped out at a disturbing rate and by touting himself as a writer his leftist fans could trust. Though a critic of capitalism, Sinclair was fully implicated in the dynamics of consumer culture. The same year as the smoking-gun letter, Sinclair had invited the Los Angeles Record into his home to do a spread about him, one that read like any other celebrity puff piece, replete with pictures of Sinclair relaxing by his pool. As he explained to The Nation the same year, he understood a thing or two about “publicity.”
Perhaps it’s unwise to look for ideological consistency when the right wages culture war against what Goldberg called “liberal saints” who reach “icon status.” But in the case of Boston, it’s unfair to suggest the matter is one simply of Sinclair’s lying. Neither the 1920s Communist attempt to glorify Sacco and Vanzetti nor the right’s recent attack allow for the complexity that the study of American history should nurture.
At one point in Boston, Sinclair writes, “A terrible world to live in! A world full of tangles impossible to unravel, of dangers impossible to foresee!” For a man who too often thought that he could predict a socialist utopia (and tell you the exact year it would dawn), that was a refreshing admission.
Sinclair struggled to write a historical novel that refused to turn immigrant laborers into innocent martyrs or just tell “lies.” But what kind of news copy would that make?
Kevin Mattson is a professor of contemporary history at Ohio University and author, most recently, of Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century (John Wiley & Sons, 2006).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 52, Issue 26, Page B11
