The Accursed

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Upton had immediately fired off a letter protesting that it wasn’t the notorious philanderer Byron with whom Upton Sinclair should be compared, but America’s own, far greater and nobler Harriet Beecher Stowe—“whose masterpiece Uncle Tom’s Cabin has changed all of our lives, forever.”

  (The New York Evening World had kindly published Upton’s letter, which ran the length of two columns, for which Upton Sinclair was grateful, if somewhat surprised. Socialists were accustomed to being disdained, dismissed, or viciously attacked by the enemy press: it was a startling reversal, when the press appeared to cooperate.)

  The Jungle continued to capture the attention of ever more readers, it seemed, as well as the attention of politicians and statesmen; among its renowned readers were the President of the United States and the Honorable Winston Churchill, an Englishman of thirty-two years of age with a seat in Parliament and a respected position in English journalism, as Upton had learned. (Churchill had written an extremely perceptive two-part assessment of The Jungle for a progressive English weekly.) Photographers, reporters, and the less scrupulous of the columnists dogged the author’s path; editors who had formerly rejected his most worthy efforts, and dismissed Upton Sinclair as a hack writer, now pleaded with him to write for their magazines, offering such financial enticements, the confused young author could not resist. (“If only I had an assistant!—an indentured servant, or a slave”—so Upton joked to comrades—“I could accept every commission, promote our cause, and make a little profit in the effort.”)

  Though sales for The Jungle were modest compared to the far more admired and entertaining The Sea Wolf, by Jack London, the novel continued to ride the crest of the best-seller list; and so many aroused individuals were writing to the author, he was in despair of finding time to answer them all. (“Ah, I miss Meta! She would be ideal to answer these letters in her sincere yet diplomatic manner.”) Most of the letters conveyed enthusiasm for Upton’s exposé of capitalism, and included hair-raising personal accounts of injuries, deaths, and humiliations in the workforce, but a considerable number contained threats, veiled or explicit; others suggested mental derangement in the letter-writers; and numerous letters proposed marriage, or business partnerships, or a new religion, or a vegetarian commune, and the like. Most upsetting were those begging frankly for money, displaying not the least interest in The Jungle or in the brotherhood of Socialism itself.

  Hardly a day passed without a virulent attack upon the authenticity of the book, which was presented, for reasons of legal caution, as a “novel”; editorials and columns appeared in the Hearst papers particularly, attacking Upton Sinclair’s “integrity, decency, and American patriotism.” All these, Upton felt obliged to answer. And problems had lately arisen regarding the administration of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, in which Upton Sinclair was a founding officer, and Jack London a former president; during London’s brief term, the Society went badly into debt. Yet, at the present time, Upton Sinclair was hoping to save enough money of his own, and perhaps to borrow some, to make a down payment on Helicon Hall, in rural New Jersey, formerly a boys’ private school that had closed in bankruptcy; the price of the entire property was a staggering $34,000 . . .

  Recent months had been so strenuous, Upton had suffered a recurrence of ulcers, and was on a very restricted diet indeed, of “primarily white” foods; his daily reading matter included the popular Physical Culture, Natural Health by Jeremiah Pym, Ph.D. and M.D. As a (female) comrade-friend had chided Upton: “It won’t do the revolution any good if you’re in pain trying to digest a simple meal, and continue to lose weight as you have been. We need vigorous speakers, not penitent martyrs.”

  Many were the young women, and some not so young, who implored Upton Sinclair to take better care of himself, for the sake of the revolution; and offered to feed him, and even to help clothe and dress him; even to “trim” his hair, that badly needed tending-to.

  (“If Meta knew, she would not take me for granted, maybe! She would be jealous, maybe! And not dismiss her husband with scorn.”)

  The most immediate result of the financial success of The Jungle was the possibility of establishing the Helicon Home Colony within a few months, and not being forced to wait for years, as Upton had expected. (Of course, Upton was obliged to supply financial support to Meta and their child, when he remembered to; in the meantime, it seemed to him that his wife and son were living very contentedly with Meta’s parents in a redbrick house on Staten Island, and did not need much interference from him.) Yet, an unfortunate blunder had already been made, by Upton Sinclair, in terms of “public relations”; for in releasing to the press a hastily composed statement on the Colony—

  Helicon Home Colony will be an Utopian effort at cooperative living in the midst of the Capitalist state: democratic in principle and practice; devoted to reform, experimentation, and radical theories of education; and to any individual of good moral character who is free from communicable disease and of sound mental health.

  —he had drawn a good deal of ridicule and censure upon his head, which he feared he might not soon overcome, as newspapers made merry over the last qualification regarding “communicable disease” and “sound mental health.”

  (Indeed, Upton Sinclair could have had no idea how the comical specter of “communicable disease” would be used repeatedly to ridicule his idealistic enterprise; and the phrase “any individual” be deployed to suggest that the Helicon Colony was dedicated to “race mixing” as to “free love” and “atheism.”)*

  “So, this is ‘fame,’ ” Upton mused to himself, in Penn Station, “—being the subject of perpetual attack in the outside world and, in the inner, made sleepless by a racing brain, a fast pulse, and a perpetual queasiness in the southern regions of the belly.”

  ONE OF THE MORE remarkable consequences of the young Socialist’s renown was an invitation to dine at the White House with President Teddy Roosevelt and his famed “tennis cabinet”; for indeed, the eagerly awaited summons finally arrived for Upton Sinclair; and the young author, who’d not long ago written jokes for Jude, Puck, Graham’s, and Life for one dollar each, and had feared he was prostituting his genius by penning nickel novels under a variety of pseudonyms (“Benjamin Frankman,” “Horatio Linkhorn”), as well as his searing Socialist diatribes, now found himself dining in gentlemanly splendor at the very vortex of political power in Washington, D.C.

  Meta will be aggrieved now, when I tell her of this grand occasion, Upton thought, packing his worn valise with several copies of his earlier books for presentation to the President, for I am sure she would have wished to accompany me, as my wife.

  Yet after the initial excitement of taking the train to the great vaulted station at D.C., and hiking a little distance to the White House, and being ushered into the President’s private dining room, and shaking “Teddy’s” genial hand, and being introduced to “Teddy’s” aides, the young author began to feel a prick of disappointment: for it seemed, though Roosevelt was an affable enough personality with an interest in, as he said robustly, giving hell to the meat packers, his attitude toward Upton Sinclair and Socialism generally was not what Upton had hoped.

  And the luncheon itself, which Upton had awaited with boyish eagerness, proved to be one of the ordeals of his adult life.

  Promptly at twelve o’clock the luncheon party was seated, at a long table at which President Roosevelt sat at the head, and his chief aide at the foot; they were served by mute-seeming Negro waiters in impeccable white uniforms, that emphasized the dramatic darkness of their skins; the men ate, with the exception of Upton Sinclair, with appalling gusto, as if they had not eaten in days; and Teddy ate, and talked—talked.

  “The Old Guard senators be damned,” the President declared, striking the table with a clenched fist, so that cutlery rattled against china, “I know what I know, and my stomach isn’t deceived. It was tainted, and overripe, and damn-right maggoty meat we were given in the very act of serving our nation in Cu
ba! Treason! That crook Armour should have been hanged!—the packers should have been hanged! Routed, and tarred and feathered, and set ablaze, and hanged for treason in wartime. And now this courageous young man Mr. Sinclair exposes the fact that Armour & Company profit by shoveling rat dung, and cow fetuses, and cow tails, and eyeballs, and every variety of gristle, innards, and excrement, and, by God, fingers and toes of human beings, into such staples of the American household as deviled ham—a favorite of my boyhood!—spicing it up, as it were, with the expectorations of hunkie T.B. carriers! This treason will not be countenanced as long as Teddy Roosevelt sits in the White House.”

  So many grimaces accompanied this speech, and so many blows on the table, Upton Sinclair had to steel himself not to wince, staring in amazement at his fiery host. How very like Jack London the President was, and Mother Jones: the impolite yet admiring word had to be rabble-rouser, a talent surely bred in the womb. Teddy’s voice so brayed, Upton felt a need to press his fingers into his ears, seated beside the man, yet did not make a move of course. It was stunning to him, whose demeanor even in Socialist circles was reticent and restrained, and whose manner was always to defer to someone who interrupted him, to observe a man for whom speech was indeed a kind of sustained expectoration; to see that the outsized “Teddy” of the tabloids and popular imagination was an actual person, of the species of caricature. (Yet no caricaturist could do justice to the living man, Upton saw.) It seemed that the President was accustomed to entertaining his listeners and himself with a performance of serio-comic genius: gruff, blustery, big-toothed, excessive and exaggerated, with a high squeaking voice issuing from the fleshy face; indistinguishable, except for the content of his words, from imitations of “Teddy” by vaudeville and burlesque comedians.

  When the President at last paused in his ranting, to lower his head to his plate and eat, all that he’d said was heartily if somewhat perfunctorily seconded by his vice president Mr. Charles Fairbanks, his Republican-party comrade Mr. James Garfield, his aide Mr. Francis Leupp, and others, who gave every evidence of having listened closely to the outburst, as if they had never heard it before. The genial Mr. Fairbanks was so thoughtful, or possessed of so sly a sense of humor, as to observe to Upton Sinclair that all pleasure in the day’s meal was considerably qualified by the “gross, shameful, nauseating” revelations in The Jungle; though, as the vegetarian Upton wryly noted, the gentlemen were devouring their roast beef rare with unslackened appetite.

  Why does humankind insist upon eating animals?—is it in lieu of eating one another?—so Upton thought, sipping water from a crystal goblet as, elsewhere around the table, the gentlemen were drinking a very pungent-smelling dark ale.

  In an interrogative way, that made Upton Sinclair quite uncomfortable, the President asked why he’d investigated the Chicago stockyards in the first place, and “why in hell” had he suffered the hardship of spending seven weeks in the Stockyards Hotel; but when Upton tried to explain that it was his sympathy for the workingman, particularly those of foreign birth, and his more general interest in the Socialist brotherhood of man, and in the vegetarian movement, rather than a narrow interest in the sanitary conditions of the packing houses, it seemed that the President’s eyes acquired a distant look behind the round glinting lenses of his glasses; and a moment later, in an outburst that might have been considered rude in other circumstances, the President interrupted his guest with a sudden guffaw, and a smart blow to the table, having at that instant recalled a meal he and his Rough Riders had been forced to consume on the “very eve” of the great Battle of San Juan Hill.

  “Tainted, and overripe, and damn-right maggoty, I say!”—even as he scooped a dripping piece of roast beef into his mouth, and chewed.

  This led to an entertaining reminiscence on the part of Roosevelt regarding his famed Rough Riders, which cavalry unit had participated in more skirmishes than the pacifist Upton Sinclair had known. The President seemed particularly proud of the fact that his unit had suffered a high degree of casualties—“Many more than the average, sir!”—and that they’d indeed had a “damn rough time of it” during the ten weeks’ fighting of the “splendid little war” against the Spanish villains. “It was that damned ‘embalmed beef’ that counted for most of our casualties,” the President said grimly, “and now that I sit in the damned White House, Armour & Crook Company had better take notice.”

  During a welcome lull in the conversation while the gentlemen were sampling a new, even darker and more pungent ale, Upton broached the subject of the plight of the “common workingman and woman” in the country, which he saw as unconscionable, set beside the massive profits of their capitalist employers. Since the President and his aides had presumably read The Jungle, they were now well informed of conditions in Chicago, and would surely wish to propose some legislation to remedy them at once; yet it should be understood that working conditions in stockyards throughout the country were no better, or even worse; and the pay scale was frequently lower. And the cruelty to the animals—this, indeed, was not to be countenanced by decent persons . . . Upton grew increasingly impassioned until his voice trembled. “Only consider the wretched working conditions in factories owned by the copper trust, and the steel trust, and the tin trust, and all the rest. How can it be tolerated, Mr. President, that even as we dine in this elegant room, children as young as six and seven are toiling in factories close by us, particularly across the river in Maryland; and the inhuman owners insist that it is their right to dismiss any worker who pleads for a twelve-hour, instead of a fourteen-hour, day. And—”

  Here Roosevelt interrupted with such vehemence that spittle flew from his lips. “And you must not forget, Mr. Sinclair, the shipbuilding trust,” he said, “that foul octopus of traitors, presided over in shameless pomposity by Senator Hale of Maine!” Here the President became so overwrought he pushed his plate from him, and began to pick his teeth agitatedly with a gold pick. In a breathless high-pitched voice he cried: “Gentlemen, I give you Senator Hale of Maine!—the most innately and essentially malevolent scoundrel that God Almighty ever allowed to exist on Earth! Why, it’s criminal how the man stonewalls against me—what lies and slanders he spins of my ‘fear’ of him! It has come to light that the traitor conspires with my enemies in Washington, that the shipbuilding trust shall ‘sail merrily’ over my grave. Hale should be hanged, sir! They should all be hanged.”

  All at the table loudly concurred, except for the abashed guest; and discussion flowed over other traitors, like dirty water across the white linen tablecloth, that was itself, by this time, liberally splattered with spots and stains: persons as diverse as James J. Hill, J. P. Morgan, and George F. Baer, on the one hand; and David Graham Phillips on the other. (Phillips, a well-respected colleague of Upton’s, was the author of the courageous exposé “The Treason of the Senate,” then appearing in Cosmopolitan; one of his particular targets was Senator Hale from Maine.) The President seemed to have forgotten his guest of honor as he lapsed into a wrathful denunciation of the tribe of muckrakers themselves . . .*

  It was Upton’s attention, stated to his comrade-friends in New York City, that when he had the President’s ear he would broach the subject of immediate legislation to protect workers, and to guarantee some sort of absolute minimum wage; for it would be a sorry consequence of his labors if only the American meat-eaters were “protected.” But he could not wedge a word into the conversation, it seemed; it was not simply that Upton Sinclair was interrupted or ignored, but that he had become invisible; and much of the heated discussion dealt with matters, with individual Democrats and Republicans, of which he knew nothing. So, Upton sipped discontentedly at his glass of water, and thought it a melancholy irony that he should be at last at the White House, as the President’s guest, yet as powerless as ever. “Better to be hidden away in the countryside beyond Princeton,” he mused, “in my quaint little cabin, laboring over The Jungle . . . while Meta prepares a delicious dinner, and tends to little David. Ah, wer
e we not happy then!”

  After an hour the hearty luncheon was declared over, for, as Roosevelt said sternly, “There are some of us who work, sir—not scribble.” More genially the President laughed to his friends saying they could not spend all the day “bloviating and idling—as we might like.” The President shook Upton’s hand so vigorously that the young man’s teeth rattled, exclaiming: “Jolly good of you to drop by, sir! Most helpful! And when we meet again, Mr. Upton, it’s to be hoped that the damned traitorous packers will have been brought to their knees, like beef to the slaughter, and that scoundrel Hale hanged high!”

  ON MAY 26, 1906, the papers trumpeted the news that Roosevelt’s bill regarding federal inspection of meat, afterward known as the Meat Inspection Act, had been passed after much quarreling in Congress; and nearly every editorial on the controversial subject spoke of the “triumph” of young Upton Sinclair: for did this not prove that justice might prevail, and that “the pen was mightier than the sword”?

  Only Upton’s Socialist comrades understood the young author’s listlessness at the news, and his sense of having been betrayed, of which he scarcely dared speak to the reporters who besieged him. Upton was, however, inspired to make the single utterance for which he is known out of his long and heroic career, and his formidable outpouring of impassioned books numbering at nearly one hundred: “I aimed for the heart of America, and hit its stomach instead.”

  NOW THE HARRIED young man sits in clamorous Penn Station, hunched over his writing pad and composing as fast as his cramped hand will allow the piece for Everybody’s Magazine. It has just struck him that the striking figure of speech borrowed from Voltaire—or, more likely Hugo, since Yaeger Ruggles insisted it was Hugo—might after all be inappropriate to his purpose, for REVOLUTION IS THE HOUR OF LAUGHTER is a concept that might go over the heads of, or offend, the average reader of Everybody’s; and Upton has a dread of being misunderstood yet again. And there is very little to laugh at lately for “Big Bill” Hayward’s red banners, unfurled just the other day in Paterson, New Jersey, surely signal violence to come.