Chapter II: Southern Beginnings

I.

Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland, September 20th, 1878. His father was one of the Norfolk Sinclairs, his mother one of the Baltimore Hardens. That is to say, he was by ancestry and birth a Southerner. His childhood, moreover--until his tenth year, when his family moved to New York City--was spent in the very Southern atmosphere of Baltimore.... This background is so alien to the theme of modern American industrialism as to arouse a wonder and provoke a question: How did this child of the South ever come to write _The Jungle_?

For the South of his childhood had a history of its own, sufficiently different from that of the factory-building North. It is true that Baltimore, an important seaport in close proximity to coal mines, had already begun its industrial career; but the relations of capital and labor presented so far no tragic problems of which a little boy would hear. And such vague rumors as might have reached the child in Baltimore of the “labor troubles” up North--the strike in Chicago at the McCormick reaper works, the agitation for an eight-hour day, the Haymarket riot, and the hanging of the Chicago “Anarchists”--could have made no deep impression on his young consciousness.[1] He was living in another world than that. It was the world of an aristocracy ruined by the Civil War and struggling to regain its place in the sun.

II.

The Sinclairs of Norfolk had been a navy family. Before the first Sinclair came to America, there had been Sinclairs in the British navy. A Sinclair had commanded a frigate in the American navy in the War of 1812.[2] His son had followed him into the navy, and had been in command of one of the ships of Commodore Perry in the famous expedition of 1852-54 which “opened up” Japan. But in 1861, this officer had had to make a disastrous choice of loyalties.... There was a story which was a part of the Sinclair family tradition, about the two old sea-dogs who sat up all one April night in Norfolk, arguing out their duty and their destinies. One was Lieutenant Commander Arthur Sinclair, the boy Upton’s grandfather; the other was his old friend and shipmate, Captain David Farragut. Both were Southerners, both Virginians--and Virginia had that day seceded from the Union. They argued all night in Sinclair’s study and in the morning Farragut went North to offer his services to President Lincoln--while Sinclair stayed to fight for the South.[3] History preserves the name of Farragut as the commander of the victorious squadron which captured New Orleans and Mobile and sealed the South within a fatal blockade. Sinclair’s further career is recorded only in the obscure annals of the defeated Confederacy. He commanded a blockade-runner which was sunk in a storm off the coast of England, carrying him to his death, and his body was buried in a churchyard at Hull.

His family’s history was henceforth united with that of the lost cause. His eldest son had served four years under his father in the U. S. navy; he went into the Confederate navy, burned his ship to prevent its capture by Farragut at Mobile, was an officer on the blockade-runner _Alabama_ which was finally sunk in English waters, survived to write a book about it, and died in poverty in a Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home. Another son was also in the Confederate navy, and, more fortunate, lived to adorn New York society. Still another, Upton Beall Sinclair, who was to become the father of the novelist, was too young to see much of the fighting, though he took a gun and ran away from home to help in the final defense of the Confederate capital, Richmond.... The Sinclairs, along with all the rest of the South, were ruined, at least until they could successfully adapt themselves to new conditions. During the “reconstruction” period, when Southern affairs were run by “carpetbagger” politicians from the North with the aid of the votes of Negro freedmen, they were no longer members of the ruling class, with a prescriptive right to places of power and pride. They had to make their livings as best they could.

Moreover it would be a long time before the cotton and tobacco industries adjusted themselves comfortably to the new wage-labor system. Slavery was gone, and the old aristocratic ease only a sentimental memory. But the South loved its memories, bitter as they were--and drinking, that generous accompaniment of the old aristocratic ease, became an important solace of the harassed post-war period. Even if the proud womenfolk of the South got up stealthily in the dead of night to wash the doorsteps and perform other menial tasks, thus honorably concealing their poverty, there was always money for the menfolk to spend on good whiskey. The liquor trade thrived in the ruined South. And so it was that Upton B. Sinclair became a wholesale liquor salesman.

The young salesman’s business took him to Baltimore, and there he met and married Priscilla Harden, daughter of the secretary and treasurer of the Western Maryland railroad. Maryland, violently Southern in its sympathies--so much so that the first blood of the Civil War was shed there when a mob resisted the passage of Northern regiments on their way to Washington--had nevertheless been kept within the Union by force of arms. It had not suffered with the rest of the South the rigors of blockade; and though it had endured the inconvenience of military occupation, it had not been devastated by invasion and battle, and it was able to share to some considerable extent in the economic growth and prosperity of the North after the war. The Hardens were moderately rich; and one of Priscilla’s sisters had married a Baltimore banker named Bland, who presently founded the United States Fidelity and Guaranty Company, and became a millionaire many times over.

Priscilla Harden’s marriage with the young salesman was less fortunate in an economic sense. Mr. Sinclair was not a sufficiently enterprising salesman, and was destined never to rise from the ranks. A gentle little man, the soul of courtesy to women and of loyalty to his friends, full of proud old Southern ideals of chivalry, having the knightly Robert E. Lee as his _beau ideal_, he was not one to succeed in business.

In Upton Sinclair’s autobiographical novel, _Love’s Pilgrimage_, there is a portrait of his father. From his old-fashioned aristocratic point of view he hated this modern business world in which he struggled. Those among whom his work took him “never guessed the depths of his contempt for all they stood for. They had the dollars, they were on top; but some day the nemesis of Good-breeding would smite them--the army of the ghosts of Gentility would rise, and with ‘Marse Robert’ and ‘Jeb’ Stuart at their head, would sweep away the hordes of commercialdom.”

Mr. Sinclair was devoted to his wife and worshipped his only son. He was bitterly unhappy because his ineffectual efforts on their behalf left them still mired in poverty. As he brooded over his failure, he came more and more to resort to the solace of his own wares; and of that, too, he was ashamed. But he could at least teach his son to be a kind and chivalrous Southern gentleman.

The boy’s mother was a Southern good woman, patient and practical. Like other Southern women who had seen too much of the ravages of drunkenness among their menfolk, she hated drink with a fierce hatred born of fear. All her capacity for unworldly idealism was centered in that emotion. She brought up her son to fear and hate liquor; she herself did not even drink tea or coffee, because they were “stimulants”, and there was in her example and attitude a continual protest against “self-indulgence”--a touch of Spartan sternness. But for the rest, she had an innocent and happy worldliness, which desired and approved all the respectable comforts which life had to offer. Except for this fear of the consequences of “self-indulgence”, a fear which was emphasized by the family circumstances, her influence upon her son would be wholly in the direction of conformity with the respectable world. And if for a time she hoped to see him go into the ministry, it was with the somewhat worldly expectation of seeing him in a bishop’s robes....

In Grandmother Sinclair’s dining-room there was a portrait, well remembered, of the old sea-dog, Commodore Sinclair; and the boy Upton was told that he had his grandfather’s nose--in the portrait a fierce, proud eagle-beak. And it was hoped that in the child’s quiet stubbornness there was evidence of the ancestral trait of indomitable will. The boy was to go into the navy, and might become a hero like his grandfather. At the age of six, that was his ambition.

It was no unreasonable ambition. His parents were poor, but--aside from such influence as might be exerted by his rich relatives--poverty would not stand in the way of the appointment to the Naval Academy of a boy who was of cavalier stock and whose forefathers had served the State. He might easily enough get the nomination to Annapolis from his congressman; it was only necessary for him to be a bright enough lad to pass his examinations--and there would be no difficulty about that. Early in childhood, without having gone to school, he had taught himself to read, and had already begun to exhibit a precocious intellectuality. The only possible question was one of health. A series of infantile diseases had left him a rather delicate child. That was dealt with by keeping him out of school till the age of ten, to give his body, in the homely phrase, a chance to catch up with his brains. And, though he pursued his education with more intensity by himself than he would have done at school, he did become physically robust. There was, apparently, every reason to believe that young Upton Sinclair would become an officer in the U. S. navy.... One can imagine him thus now, a slight, straight, grizzled captain, something of a martinet, unquestionably brave, not very popular, a little aloof, doing his duty, carrying on the family traditions. But life had other destinies in store for him.

III.

The gentle, chivalrous father, unable to make a decent living for the wife and son he loved, became in his discouragement more and more dependent upon the liquid consolations which he peddled. Ashamed of his lapses from grace, afraid to go home and confess himself again conquered by his weakness, he would stay away, drinking himself into the stupor of forgetfulness. The family poverty at times became desperate. There were, to be sure, when bitter necessity had overcome her pride, Mrs. Sinclair’s relatives to turn to for help. And the child was, of course, always welcome at the homes of “Grandfather Harden” and “Uncle Bland”. The Bland wealth was gained during the boy’s childhood and youth, and he grew up amidst the constantly expanding grandeur of the Bland family. The contrast between the luxury of these prosperous Baltimore and country homes and his own dingy boarding-house background made him feel more acutely the poverty of which he was the victim.

Moreover, the help that was extended to his family by these more fortunate relatives could scarcely be given without, in the eyes of a sensitive child, an appearance of condescension, against which all his pride was in revolt. It seemed to a child’s sense of justice that the family needs rightfully entitled them to a chance for life and happiness; and it was shameful that this should be granted them as a favor, that they should have to beg for it. “To each according to his needs” is the natural economic code of childhood.... But it was inevitably with his own needs and their frustration that he was secretly preoccupied. It seems, to a child, that all for which he wishes belongs rightfully to him already; and it is hateful to him that power over his own life and happiness should be in other hands, to be granted as a favor, not conceded as a right. To have to beg for what already belongs to one is, in the code of childhood, to pay too humiliating a price for it. One would rather, if one is sufficiently sensitive, go without.

His sensitive egotism had thus in childhood become painfully complicated with the poverty of his family and the wealth of some of the family relatives. And, most painfully of all, he felt that he need not remain, if he chose, the victim of his parents’ poverty. He was as a child much loved by these rich relatives; and he understood that he was always welcome to stay with them. This possibility, of escape from poverty, never came up for formal decision, and remained for a long time to torment him. But at the age of ten it emerged more definitely into his consciousness, when his family decided to leave Baltimore. They were going to New York City, where his father had got a position as a traveling salesman--his line this time being hats, instead of whiskey. It would have been very easy for the boy to stay on in Baltimore and have his relatives’ assistance in getting an education. In effect this would mean, when it came to his choice of a career, that he would have all the advantages of a rich man’s son. He hated poverty; and above all he dreaded going on with the endless and hopeless struggle with drink in which his father was involved. But loyalty and chivalry had been among the old-fashioned Southern virtues which his father had inculcated in him, and he chose to share his father’s struggle.... Perhaps he remembered the tale, heard as a child, of his grandfather’s debate with Captain Farragut. Commodore Sinclair had done his duty, and his grandson could do no less.

It was a bitter duty which he had to look forward to. He was getting old enough now to help his father in his times of weakness. Soon, when his father did not come home, it would be the boy’s task to seek for him in one saloon after another until he found him. Yes, and give him the reassurance that he most needed--that they still loved him in spite of everything;--and so bring him back to the boarding-house where his wife sat and wept.... The boy, in choosing, knew what he was in for.

The emotional relations between the boy and his father are described in _Love’s Pilgrimage_, where the boy is called Thyrsis. “To others his father was merely a gross little man, with sordid ideals and low tastes; but to Thyrsis he was a man with the terror of the hunted creatures in his soul, and the furies of madness cracking their whips about his ears.”... “There were rich relatives, a world of real luxury up above--the thing that calls itself ‘Society’. And Thyrsis was a student and a bright lad, and he was welcome there; he might have spread his wings and flown away from this sordidness. But duty held him, and love and memory held him still tighter. For his father worshipped him, and craved his help; to the last hour of this dreadful battle he fought to keep his son’s regard--he prayed for it, with tears in his eyes and anguish in his voice. And so the boy had to stand by. And that meant that he grew up in a torture-house.”

IV.

A sensitive child who grows up in an ugly and hateful world becomes something of a poet in self-defense. He has to shut himself away from all the world’s ugliness and hatefulness in an imaginative world of books and dreams. His natural creative energies, baffled by the obduracy of outward circumstances, will begin to work upon the more plastic materials furnished by reverie. Books and dreams are his natural refuge, and to become an artist his inevitable secret dream.

“There was”, it is written of the boy “Thyrsis” in _Love’s Pilgrimage_, “not much of what is called ‘culture’ in his family; no music at all, and no poetry. But there were novels, and there were libraries where one could get more of these, so Thyrsis became a devourer of stories; he would disappear, and they would find him at meal-times hidden in a clump of bushes or in a corner behind a sofa--anywhere out of the world. He read whole libraries of adventure: Mayne Reid and Henty, and then Cooper and Stevenson and Scott. And then came more serious novels--‘Don Quixote’, and ‘Les Miserables’, George Eliot, whom he loved, and Dickens, whose social protest thrilled him; and chiefest of all, Thackeray, who molded his thought. Thackeray saw to the heart of it; and no high-souled lad who read him and worshipped him was ever after to be lured by the glamor of the ‘great’ world--a world whose greatness was based upon selfishness and greed.” He needed, it would seem, such help as Thackeray’s to enable him to resist the very real temptation to become a part of such a world.

He needed, moreover, figures with whose heroic renunciation he could take satisfaction in imaginatively identifying himself; nor did he fail to find them in this realm of ideal types. In his childhood the most significant of these figures was that of Jesus--who had hated the power of Mammon and built up a Kingdom of the Spirit. The idea of Jesus driving the money-changers out of the Temple remained throughout his childhood a vivid and consoling fantasy. And this secret Kingdom of the Spirit, in which he walked in lonely exaltation, gave him reasons more profound even than those of love and duty for refusing to live a life of luxury. For the life of his rich relatives was not the ideal life of his poetic dreams. It seemed to him that these riches were wasted. They were not used in achieving beauty and happiness, but only in acquiring toys.

“What do I mean by toys?” he wrote later, in _Wilshire’s_. “Why, just things. Nothing but things--all things in this big world except half a dozen useful things. The uses of bread and bacon, of a stove and a wood-pile, I recognize with all my heart; and also of beautiful books in an occasional rare instance; and always, of course, of prayer and music, of joy and love, of wisdom and high resolve. Those things--that are as free as air and sky and the flowers--are serious things; and all things else that this spreading earth has to show, all the infinite unthinkability that is shut up in a thousand mighty cities and is fought and cried for” by adult children “are _toys_--just _toys!_” It is a cry out of his own childhood, when, forced by unhappiness to take life seriously, he realized that these grown-up people had by no means put away childish things. Toy-lovers still, preoccupied with acquiring and displaying their toy-titles, toy-learning, toy-houses, toy-food and toy-clothes, they were unable even to wish for the real beauties and joys that life had to offer. His path, then, surely, was different from theirs....

Yet, in so sternly and resolutely refusing to be tempted aside from his own secret goal, he must have felt deep and aching regrets at the good things which he was incidentally but necessarily giving up. There had been a time in his childhood when he was naïvely fond of luxury; there were relatives on his father’s side who were poor and whom he did not care to visit because of a “snobbery of the palate”, preferring the excellent table of his wealthier relatives. His mother would scarcely have condemned that as “self-indulgence”; but it was a worldly tendency which he learned to resist with Spartan asceticism. In inwardly deciding to give up these luxuries, he must unconsciously have felt it necessary to despise them; and among the luxuries which he thus came to despise were such simple and innocent things as good food, idleness, and play. His hard choice would seem to have confirmed him in a too stern and ascetic attitude toward life. Some of the simple, natural, happy, playful aspects of living were unconsciously classed in his mind as temptations, and came to be regarded with the emotional hostility[4] he had already been taught to feel for drinking, as things to be feared and hated.... Nor, under the circumstances, was that exaggerated emotion quite absurd. These things _were_ temptations to him; and it was the effort to save his poet’s soul alive that he became a Puritan.