Sinclair, Upton (1878-1968)

American novelist Upton Sinclair is most famous for his 1906 novel The Jungle and the reforms to which it gave rise. Sinclair was a muckraker—so dubbed by President Theodore Roosevelt, who regarded them as a nuisance—one of a group of journalists who were relentless in their exposure of corruption in American business and government.

Sinclair intended his book, set in the Chicago meat-packing industry, to arouse support for the plight of immigrant laborers. He exposed the political machinations of the Democratic and Republican parties and put forward the Socialist Party as the only trustworthy organization. Instead, The Jungle triggered outrage at the malfeasance of the meat packers, who had little care that much of their processed meat was adulterated with dirt, dung, poisoned rats, and the odd human body part. Roosevelt apparently read the book and dispatched investigators who confirmed the veracity of Sinclair's account. Under threat of releasing the report, Roosevelt forced through the 1906 Meat Packing Act to regulate the industry. Although the act brought the meat packers under the regulatory arm of the government, it had little in the way of enforcement. Moreover, the bigger firms were able to meet the government's requirements, whereas many smaller firms could not, and so the act effectively increased the strength of big business; certainly not Sinclair's intended outcome. At the time, Sinclair joked, "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

The Jungle was Sinclair's sole best-seller, but he went on to publish a series of similarly themed novels. Among them were Oil! (1927), about the Teapot Dome Scandal of President Warren Harding's administration, and Boston (1928), about the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian-American radicals convicted and executed for robbery and murder, a cause celebre of 1927. In 1940 Sinclair began a series of eleven novels with a contemporary setting featuring an antifascist hero, Lanny Budd. Sinclair placed Budd in the action of all major events of his time.

In 1933 Sinclair established and led the End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign. His solution to Depression-era unemployment was for the state to rent unused land and factories so the unemployed could grow their own food and produce clothing and furniture. In August 1934 he easily won the Democratic primary race for governor. Conservative Democrats then aligned with the anti-New Deal Republican Governor Frank Merriman to defeat Sinclair in the November election. The campaign was marked by the hysterical level of the anti-Sinclair material, which included faked newsreels showing hoboes descending on California and accusations of Communism.

By the end of the twentieth century The Jungle was still in print but not included in college anthologies of American literature. EPIC generally is treated as an indication of the sort of political anomalies the Depression produced, and as an aside to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

—Ian Gordon

Further Reading:

Mitchell, Greg. The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics. New York, Random House, 1992.

Scott, Ivan. Upton Sinclair, The Forgotten Socialist. Lewiston, N.Y.,Edwin Mellen Press, 1997.