The Jungle’s muckraker who nearly governed California
Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) wrote nearly one hundred books as muckraker and activist, running for California governor as Democrat in 1934. The Jungle (1906) exposed meatpacking filth and helped spur that year’s Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act. Socialist campaigns for Congress failed earlier; EPIC lost the governorship.
The Flivver King tracked Henry Ford from wage experiments to Dearborn Independent antisemitism; King Coal confronted Rockefeller Jr. after the 1914 Ludlow Massacre.
Born in Baltimore to a liquor salesman whose drinking darkened the household and a strict Episcopalian mother who shunned even tea and coffee, he grew up moving often and did not enter school until he was ten. He graduated from City College in 1897, then enrolled at Columbia to study law but spent his energy on writing and languages. Around sixteen he broke with his mother and largely avoided her for 35 years.
To research The Jungle he worked undercover for seven weeks in Chicago's packing plants in 1904. Its earnings funded the Helicon Home Colony in Englewood, New Jersey, a utopian community that excluded Jews and non-white people and burned down under suspicious circumstances within a year. He first ran for Congress in New Jersey in 1906 and polled 3 percent. After three trips to the Colorado coal fields in 1913 and 1914 he wrote King Coal and helped organise protests against Rockefeller at the Standard Oil offices in New York.
He moved to Pasadena in 1916 and, with his second wife Mary Craig, produced Sergei Eisenstein's film ¡Qué viva México! in 1930–32 at Charlie Chaplin's urging. His book Mental Radio (1930) described Mary's apparent telepathy. He founded California's branch of the American Civil Liberties Union and lost Socialist bids for the House in 1920 and the Senate in 1922. In 1934 his End Poverty in California platform won him the Democratic nomination and 879,000 votes, his best result, while conservatives branded him a communist and Soviet communists dismissed him as a capitalist. The young Robert A. Heinlein worked on that campaign.
Source: Upton Sinclair
