Upton Sinclair

• 1. Introduction

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  Upton Sinclair once wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." He penned that line to explain why California newspaper editors refused to take his ideas seriously. But it could stand as the motto for his entire life's work. Here was a man who spent decades pulling back the curtain on industries, politicians, and institutions that preferred to operate in the dark. How did a boy who slept crossways on his parents' bed in Baltimore become one of the most feared writers in America? What drove him to spend seven weeks working undercover inside Chicago's meatpacking plants? And what happened when he tried to translate his convictions into actual political power? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. Two Worlds, One Childhood

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  Baltimore in the late 19th century was the setting for a childhood split in two. Sinclair was born on the 20th of September, 1878, to a family divided against itself by class. His father, Upton Beall Sinclair Sr., came from a respected Southern family ruined by the Civil War and the disruptions of Reconstruction. Alcoholism consumed him, and he moved from one failed job to another, first selling liquor, then shoes. His mother, Priscilla Harden, came from a prosperous Baltimore family and was a strict Episcopalian who disapproved of alcohol, tea, and coffee alike. As a small child, Sinclair slept on sofas or crossways on his parents' bed; when his father was out for the night, he shared his mother's bed.

  The saving grace was his mother's family. Her sister had married a millionaire, and the household Sinclair visited there was a world away from his own. Shuttling between his father's precarious circumstances and his grandparents' comfort gave him a firsthand education in how inequality worked. He later credited those two social settings with shaping every book he wrote.

  At age five, Sinclair fell in love with reading, working through every book his mother owned. He didn't start formal schooling until he was ten, and when he did, he found himself so far behind in mathematics that embarrassment drove him to catch up quickly. In 1888, the family moved to Queens, New York City. Five days before his 14th birthday, on the 15th of September, 1892, he enrolled at City College of New York. To pay his tuition, he wrote jokes, dime novels, and magazine articles for boys' weeklies and pulp magazines, producing up to 8,000 words of pulp fiction per day with the help of stenographers. By seventeen, he was earning enough to move his parents into an apartment.

• 3. The Jungle and Its Fallout

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  In 1904, Sinclair spent seven weeks working undercover in Chicago's meatpacking plants, gathering material for what would become his most famous book. He was writing for the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, which serialized The Jungle from the 25th of February, 1905, to the 4th of November, 1905, before Doubleday published it as a book in 1906. His stated ambition was to "set forth the breaking of human hearts by a system which exploits the labor of men and women for profit." The central character, Jurgis Rudkus, was a Lithuanian immigrant working in a Chicago meat factory alongside his teenage wife Ona Lukoszaite and their extended family.

  What actually shook the public was not the human suffering Sinclair had intended to spotlight but the descriptions of unsanitary conditions in the plants. Domestic and foreign purchases of American meat fell by half. Jack London called the book "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery." Sinclair himself later captured the disparity with a dry observation he published in Cosmopolitan in October 1906: "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

  President Theodore Roosevelt's reaction was complicated. He initially dismissed Sinclair as a "crackpot," writing to William Allen White that Sinclair was "hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful." After reading the novel, Roosevelt acknowledged some of Sinclair's conclusions and called for radical action against selfish capitalist greed. He still resisted what he regarded as socialist legislation. The practical result was passage of both the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act a few months later in 1906. Bertolt Brecht later drew on the book for his play Saint Joan of the Stockyards, transplanting Joan of Arc to the Chicago stockyards environment.

• 4. The Press, the Muck, and the Brass Check

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  Sinclair reserved some of his sharpest writing not for industrialists but for the institution supposedly tasked with holding them accountable. The Brass Check, published in 1919, was a systematic and, by his own reckoning, the most important and most dangerous book he had ever written. Its argument was blunt: "American Journalism is a class institution, serving the rich and spurning the poor."

  Among the specific targets was William Randolph Hearst and the yellow journalism techniques his publications had normalized. Sinclair framed the issue in almost medical terms, asking what would happen to democracy if the nerves society depended on for information gave false reports of its condition. Four years after The Brass Check appeared, the first formal code of ethics for journalists in the United States was created. Sinclair never claimed sole credit for that development, but the timing was not coincidental.

  Time magazine, drawing on a book written by Sinclair's second wife Mary Craig, summed him up as "a man with every gift except humor and silence." The characterization stung precisely because it captured something real about a writer who produced nearly 100 books and other works across his lifetime, almost never pausing for long.

• 5. The EPIC Campaign

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  By the time the Great Depression arrived, Sinclair had been a card-carrying member of the Socialist Party since 1902. In 1934, he made a calculated switch: he registered as a Democrat and launched the End Poverty in California campaign, known by its acronym EPIC. The platform galvanized the Democratic Party and won him the party's gubernatorial nomination. He gathered 879,000 votes, making it easily his most successful run for office.

  It was not enough. Incumbent Governor Frank Merriam won with 1,138,000 votes. What Sinclair remembered afterward was not the vote count but the campaign against him. Hollywood studio bosses unanimously opposed his candidacy. They pressured employees to support Merriam and produced propaganda films attacking Sinclair without giving him any chance to respond. Sinclair later described a "campaign of lying" ordered by the biggest businessmen in California and paid for with millions of dollars, carried out through newspapers, politicians, advertisers, and the film industry. The negative tactics used against him are briefly depicted in David Fincher's 2020 film Mank.

  The Socialist Party expelled Sinclair for running as a Democrat. American and Soviet communists disassociated from him as well, considering him too much of a capitalist. He found himself squeezed from every side. In a 1951 reflection on the campaign, he offered a frank assessment: running on a socialist ticket had earned him 60,000 votes, while running on the slogan to End Poverty in California had earned him 879,000. Robert A. Heinlein, who would later become one of science fiction's most celebrated voices, was deeply involved in Sinclair's campaign before moving away from that political stance in later life.

  After the defeat, Sinclair published I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked in 1935, laying out the machinery of his opponents' tactics, including the evangelical preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, who vehemently opposed socialism and what she perceived as Sinclair's modernism.

• 6. Lanny Budd and the Pulitzer

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  After abandoning politics following the 1934 defeat, Sinclair returned to fiction and began the most sustained creative project of his career. Between 1940 and 1953, he wrote eleven novels following a character named Lanny Budd, the son of an American arms manufacturer who moves through the major political events of the first half of the 20th century. Budd mingles with world leaders and, in Sinclair's telling, does not merely witness events but often helps to propel them.

  The third novel in the series, Dragon's Teeth, published in 1942, won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1943. The novels were bestsellers on publication and appeared in translation across 21 countries. For years afterward they fell out of print and were nearly forgotten; ebook editions were published in 2016, bringing the full series back into circulation.

  An incidental detail threads through the series: Sinclair named his fictional arms-manufacturing family Budd, and an actual company called the Budd Company, founded by Edward G. Budd in 1912, manufactured arms during World War II. Whether Sinclair was aware of this company when he chose the name, the source does not say.

• 7. Family, Strangeness, and Simpson

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  Sinclair's personal life was rarely simple. His first marriage, to Meta Fuller, began on the 18th of October, 1900, after they were reintroduced at Lake Massawippi in Quebec. Meta had grown up as a childhood friend from one of the First Families of Virginia and was three years younger than Sinclair. Despite mutual warnings against rushing, they married. Their only child, David, was born on the 1st of December, 1901. Sinclair held austere views on sexuality, telling Meta that only the birth of a child gave marriage "dignity and meaning," yet he carried on a love affair with Anna Noyes during the marriage and wrote an unpublished novel about it.

  The marriage ended when Meta left Sinclair for Harry Kemp, known as the "Vagabond Poet," in late August 1911, after Sinclair had invited Kemp to camp on their land in Arden, Delaware. Unable to obtain a divorce in New York, Sinclair traveled to the Netherlands; an Amsterdam court declared the marriage annulled on the 24th of May, 1912.

  His second wife, Mary Craig Kimbrough, came from an elite family in Greenwood, Mississippi, and she and Sinclair had collaborated on the 1913 novel Sylvia, which he published under his own name alone. In his 1962 autobiography, he admitted plainly that Craig had written tales of her Southern girlhood and that he had "stolen them from her for a novel." They met when she attended one of his lectures about The Jungle. They remained married until her death in 1961.

  Sinclair's cousin was Wallis Simpson, the socialite whose relationship with King Edward VIII led to the king's abdication in 1936. Sinclair wrote in support of their marriage and described Edward's decision as "a democratic gesture whether he realizes it or not."

• 8. A Voice That Carried

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  Sinclair died on the 25th of November, 1968, in a nursing home in Bound Brook, New Jersey, a year after his third wife Mary Elizabeth Willis. He is buried next to Willis in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C. He was 90 years old. The arc from a Baltimore childhood on borrowed beds to nearly 100 published works is a long one.

  His line about salary and understanding has traveled further than almost anything else he wrote. Al Gore quoted it in An Inconvenient Truth. It surfaces in political arguments regularly enough to seem freshly coined each time. Sinclair had used it first in speeches and then in his book about the California governor's race, as a specific explanation for why editors and publishers would not seriously engage with his proposals for old-age pensions and progressive reforms. The fact that a sentence meant to describe one particular editorial failure in 1930s California became a general shorthand for institutional resistance is its own kind of testament to how precisely he had identified something lasting.