SINCLAIR, UPTON

Upton Sinclair (September 20, 1878–November 25, 1968) was a novelist and socialist whose challenge to President Franklin Roosevelt's cautious approach to recovery helped propel a second phase of New Deal reform after 1934. Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the scion of a father who suffered from alcoholism and a mother who had descended from an affluent southern family. At age ten Sinclair, already exhibiting a keen intellect and a precocious interest in writing, moved with his family to New York. As the family struggled financially, the young Sinclair began to write dime novels and short fiction for various pulp magazines to finance his studies at City College in Manhattan, which he had entered at fourteen. Thus began a career as a prolific writer; by the time of his death Sinclair had published nearly a hundred books.

Following the first of three marriages in 1900, Sinclair began developing his interest in fiction grounded in or suggested by proletarian themes and social realism. In 1904 Sinclair was asked by the editor of the Appeal to Reason, the largest circulation socialist-populist newspaper in the country, to write a fictionalized series on the conditions facing immigrant workers in the packinghouses of Chicago. The result would become The Jungle (1906), undoubtedly the most significant and enduring product of Sinclair's body of work. President Theodore Roosevelt and a middle-class readership were thoroughly repulsed by the imagery of the contaminated meat that threatened to reach their tables. The result was the passage in 1906 of the federal Food and Drugs Act and the Meat Inspection Act.

In 1915 Sinclair moved to Pasadena, California, to enjoy a more temperate climate and indulge his affinity for tennis. In 1926 he rejoined the Socialist Party that he had left during World War I, and he became its candidate for governor with a less than impressive result. The Great Depression struck California with virulence and Sinclair, seeing no viable relief or recovery plan, penned a series of general propositions in August 1933 that he termed a "Plan to End Poverty in California" (EPIC). EPIC proposed to start up idle factories to benefit unemployed workers and make available untilled land to farmers, and then distribute goods and services through a system of statewide cooperatives. The EPIC plan would also provide $50 a month to those in need over sixty years old and a similar payment to the blind, disabled, and widowed mothers with dependent children. A steeply graduated state income tax and higher inheritance and stock transfer taxes would finance the social insurance programs. The proposals quickly caught the imagination of many Californians, who formed hundreds of EPIC clubs. Realizing a propitious political opportunity, Sinclair switched to the Democratic Party and declared his candidacy for the governorship.

The 1934 gubernatorial campaign in California became one of the most revealing and memorable in American history. Pitting Sinclair against a colorless business conservative in incumbent Frank Merriam, the campaign produced all of the hallmarks of a modern electoral event. Opinion and voter polling, the use of professional media experts, negative and distorted advertisements, and the infusion of large sums of money were used to defeat the left wing insurgency led by Sinclair. The troika of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the Southern California Citrus Growers Association, and the Los Angeles Times organized the anti-Sinclair effort. The campaign culminated in an agreement by the Democratic establishment to swing the election to the Republican Merriam in exchange for bipartisan collaboration on a recovery program in the state. Although Sinclair continued to write, the EPIC campaign had clearly sapped his literary energies and for the remainder of the decade he involved himself largely in other interests, including the study of telepathy and an attempted collaboration with Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.

In 1940 Sinclair resumed writing with the publication of the first volume of his Lanny Budd historical novels, which totaled eleven volumes between 1940 and 1953. The third in the series, Dragon's Teeth (1942), based upon the rise of Nazism, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Sinclair left Pasadena in 1953 and moved to Buckeye, Arizona, where he died on November 25, 1968.

SINCLAIR, UPTON

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