Author as Politician

Read in tandem, Anthony Arthur’s “Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair” (Random House, 380 pages, $27.95) and Kevin Mattson’s “Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century” (Wiley, 304 pages, $25.95), these biographies showcase the genre’s different propensities and the authors’ different styles. As his subtitle suggests, Mr. Mattson traces the trajectory of his subject’s interaction with sociopolitical trends. Mr. Arthur, on the other hand, attends to the idiosyncratic and to the particulars of Sinclair’s affairs.Sinclair is best known for his 1906 novel “The Jungle,” which exposed the vicissitudes of immigrant life and unsanitary conditions in the meatpacking industry. Because of this book, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Sinclair to the White House, and soon thereafter federal legislation regulating the process of bringing meat to the market had been passed. Later, Roosevelt and Sinclair had a falling out, the former rejecting what he considered the alarmist rhetoric of the “muckrakers.”Mr. Mattson emphasizes the political clash between the politician and the writer, reporting that Roosevelt, “described his presidency as a ‘corrective to Socialism and an antidote to anarchy’ and pledged himself to ‘conservative radicalism.'” Mr. Arthur, on the other hand, describes a president who was also a writer and, like Sinclair, something of a Puritan. For psychological reasons that went way beyond politics, these men were bound to clash – although Mr. Arthur does not downplay the differences between the practical office holder and the idealistic author.Whereas Mr. Mattson provides a clear perspective on the world Sinclair sought to change, Mr. Arthur sometimes studies that same milieu under a microscope, as it were, so that we see, as in a novel, what it was like for our hero:Morally weak and slothful, physically short and paunchy, Upton Sinclair’s father was nonetheless vain: he thought his little hands and feet were aristocratic, his son and namesake later said, and he was a ‘natty’ dresser who knew how to wear ‘the right kinds of shoes and vests and hats and gloves.’A men’s clothing salesman, the senior Sinclair sounds a bit like Willy Loman. In any event, his son would come to believe that the novel was a kind of sales job. The preachiness of this approach to literature made Sinclair’s work, with a few exceptions, factitious – although Mr. Arthur does not make the fatherson equation implied here overt.Mr. Mattson is a bit nostalgic for the lost world of public intellectuals, and he believes that Sinclair’s career is a source of inspiration and instruction worth treasuring, even after the spectacle of writers who touted the sinking fortunes of the Soviet Union.And in some respects, Mr. Mattson is correct, since Sinclair honorably worked his way through fellow traveling and became, through his Lanny Budd novels, a staunch supporter of World War II at a time when many of his kind stubbornly rejected American capitalism.The turning point for Sinclair came when he abjured the socialist label in 1933 and ran as a Democrat for the governorship of California. While remaining his own man – often to his detriment when he made light of charges that the unemployed would flock to the golden state to obtain the benefits he promised – Sinclair sought to align himself with President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Initially, the electorate admired Sinclair’s independence and (does this sound familiar?) rejected both the corrupt Republican Party and a Democratic Party in disarray.But then, as Mr. Mattson tells it, reactionary Hollywood moguls like Louis B. Mayer and his right-hand man, Irving Thalberg, conducted a campaign of character assassination aided and abetted by every California newspaper and other corporate interests. Sinclair stood, in other words, for that “other American century,” a world of democratic equality at odds with the hegemony of Henry Luce and Henry Ford.Mr. Mattson is right – up to a point. The moguls did sully Sinclair. But Mr. Arthur, hauling us back to a strictly biographical approach, suggests that Sinclair ultimately did himself in. Not only had his many books attacked just about every vested interest in American life, but also his political program was naive in the extreme, promising to rectify the problems of the Depression within the first two years of his term in office. Indeed, Sinclair saw no need to govern for more than one term.Although Sinclair no longer called himself a socialist, during his campaign he advocated the establishment of land colonies. The state would provide the unemployed with property that would in turn be put into production, and the land colonies would pay back the state out of their profits and then become self-sustaining. While this scheme sounded benign, if impractical (what would happen to colonies that did not succeed?), it nevertheless gave the state a kind of authority and central planning power that struck many as uncomfortably reminiscent of the Soviet experiment.Sinclair ultimately won a little more than 37% of the vote to the sitting Republican governor’s 47%. A Progressive candidate accounted for the remaining percentage, which encouraged Sinclair to think the voters wanted change along the lines he proposed.Both biographers treat Sinclair’s bid for state office with considerable respect, but I have to award Mr. Arthur the edge over Mr. Mattson in terms of producing a biography qua biography. Both books are lively and stimulating narratives exploring not only Sinclair’s significance – he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for one of his Lanny Budd novels – but also the ways writers seeking to enter politics weigh the demands of their own consciences against the concerns of a public that both admires and yet ultimately shies away from the unaffiliated office seeker.crollyson@nysun.com

Author as Politician

Author as Politician

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