Upton Sinclair

From Philosopedia

Sinclair, Upton (20 September 1878 - 25 November 1968)

Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland. As a boy, his two heroes were (the anticlerical) Shelley and Jesus Christ.

Sinclair paid for his education at the College of the City of New York and Columbia University by writing for newspapers, magazines, and boys' weeklies. Sinclair's sixth novel, the muckraking classic, The Jungle (1906), catapulted his literary career and brought a Presidential inquiry into stockyard regulations, resulting in passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act and the Meat Inspection Act (1906).

Sinclair was an activist socialist who ran for public office, unsuccessfully, several times. During his lifetime, he wrote over 90 books, many of them political novels. He won the Pulitzer in 1942 for Dragon's Teeth, about the rise of Nazism.

His Views on Religion

Raised in an Episcopalian family, Sinclair was skeptically deistic as an adult, never quite losing his boyhood admiration for the moral teachings of Jesus, but going after organized religion in his book, The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic Interpretation (1918). In the preface, which Sinclair wryly titled "Offertory," he explained, "This book is a study of Supernaturalism from a new point of view - as a Source of Income and a Shield to Privilege." A cursory scan of its chapters reveals its thrust: "The Priestly Lie," "The Great fear," "Priestly Empires," "Prayer-wheels," "The Butcher-Gods," "the Holy Inquisition," "Hell-fire," "Anglicanism and Alcohol," "Bishops and Beer," "Trinity Corporation," " 'Suffer Little Children,' " "God's Armor," "The Unholy Alliance," and "Riches in Glory." In the work, he rankled many with his view that religion is a capitalist tool, that it teaches the poor to accept the fact that God has allotted them their positions in life.

In one work, They Call Me Carpenter (1922), he describes the dream a rich man has upon meeting the Christ. Theodore Dreiser was unhappy with the speculation that Sinclair had used him as his model for the fictional infidel being portrayed.

Critical of the Church, he wrote,

• Various Catholic societies . . . in every city and town in America, are pushing and plotting to get Catholics upon library boards, so that the public may not have a chance to read scientific books; to get Catholics into the public schools and on school boards, so that children may not hear about Galileo, Bruno, and Ferrer; to have Catholics in control of police and on magistrates’ benches, so that priests who are caught in brothels may not be exposed or punished.”

In Upton Sinclair's Magazine (April, 1918), he wrote,

• There are a score of great religions in the world . . . and each is a mighty fortress of graft.

Asked in 1951 if he was a theist or a humanist, he wrote Warren Allen Smith concerning humanism,

• Answering your statement that my views on theism are difficult to find, I refer you to my book called What God Means To Me (1935). No doubt you will find the material you desire there, and you have my permission to quote from the book anything which may be of use to you in compiling your article.

What God Means To Me tells of his meeting, when seventeen, a Unitarian clergyman “who informed me that he had several times met and talked with ghosts.” The book which “came nearest to swaying my mind toward the spiritist idea is Sir Oliver Lodge’s Raymond,” he wrote, and Sinclair declares he had “communications” with Jack London, who told him things no medium could have known. His wife, said Sinclair, once attended a séance and heard Oliver Wendell Holmes “speaking with a very decided New York accent.” Concluded Sinclair, “We have a choice of two courses. We can say that life is a chaos, and that we are the sport of blind forces, and take ourselves out of it forthwith. Or we can listen to the inner voice which tells us that there must be a plan, even though we cannot understand it. I have chosen the latter course.”

Highly critical of Christianity, he has held that correcting organized religion is preferable to abolishing it. Although Sinclair rejected his youthful Episcopalianism, he never rejected his faith in socialism, with the novel serving as a device to express his liberal views.

In short, Sinclair was against Christianity’s anti-scientific thrusts, its fostering notions of class, and its outlook on women, but basically he was a spiritualist.

As noted by McCabe, in Sinclair’s later years “he took up Spiritualism and wrote What God Means to Me.”

His Impact

Sinclair is presently known as a novelist, but future generations may consider him more as a Utopian whose hundred or so books included well-known historical figures as fictional characters. His eleven-volume Lanny Budd series, World’s End (1940–1953), is more a political commentary than a literary achievement, and how future critics will accept his work is debatable.

The work which received the most critical acclaim was The Jungle (1906), in which through the character of Jurgis Rudkus he indicts the inhumanistic and immoral conduct of meat-packing officials toward their own workers, and his memorably vivid descriptions of what was wrong with the industry (“There were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.”) led to governmental reform in the food inspection laws.

Sinclair’s stands included opposing prostitution, alcohol, and erotic materials.

Although he lost the California race as Democratic candidate for governor of California in 1934, he went on to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Dragon’s Teeth (1942).

His Works Include the Following

Courtmartialed - 1898

Saved By the Enemy - 1898

The Fighting Squadron - 1898

A Prisoner of Morro - 1898

A Soldier Monk - 1898

A Gauntlet of Fire - 1899

Holding the Fort (story) - 1899

A Soldier's Pledge - 1899

Wolves of the Navy - 1899

Springtime Harvest - 1901

The Journal of Arthur Stirling - 1903

Off For West Point - 1903

From Port to Port - 1903

On Guard - 1903

A Strange Cruise - 1903

The West Point Rivals - 1903

A West Point Treasure - 1903

A Cadet's Honor - 1903

Cliff, the Naval Cadet - 1903

The Cruise of the Training Ship - 1903

Prince Hagan - 1903

Manassas - 1904

A Captain of Industry - 1906

The Jungle - 1906

The Overman - 1907

The Industrial Republic - 1907

The Metropolis - 1908

The Money Changers - 1908

Samuel The Seeker - 1909

Good Health and How We Won It - 1909

The Machine (novel) - 1911

King Coal - 1917

The Profits of Religion - 1918

Jimmie Higgins - 1919

The Brass Check - 1919

The Spy - 1920

They Call Me Carpenter - 1922

Oil! - 1927

Boston - 1928

Mental Radio - 1930

Roman Holiday - 1931

American Outpost - 1932

What God Means to Me - 1935

I, Candidate For Governor: And How I Got Licked. - 1935

Co-op: a Novel of Living Together - 1936

No Pasaran!: a Novel of the Battle of Madrid - 1937

The Gnomobile- 1937

The Flivver King - 1937

World's End - 1940

Between Two Worlds - 1941

Dragon's Teeth - 1942

Wide is the Gate - 1943

Presidential Agent - 1944

Dragon Harvest - 1945

A World to Win - 1946

Presidential Mission - 1947

One Clear Call - 1948

O Shepherd, Speak! - 1949

Schenk Stefan! - 1951

The Return of Lanny Budd - 1953

The Cup of Fury - 1956

What Didymus Did - UK 1954 / It Happened to Didymus - US 1958

The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair - 1962

{CE; FFRF; FUS; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD; WAS, 20 February 1951}}