Excerpt From Upton Sinclair's 1933 Book, `The Way Out'

  

In his 1933-published book, titled The Way Out: What Lies Ahead For America, 20th-century socialist journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair wrote the following:

"There is no greater economic delusion in the world than that of benefit in the process of shipping goods all over the earth. It is sheer waste, justified only in cases where the country has not the raw materials to make that particular product...It appears that the purpose of international trade is to bring...people down to the coolie standard.

"I say that the American workers have been perfectly right in their determination to prevent this. Let the consumer be required to pay for every product a price which will give living wages to the workers. But then, I add, let us see that the money goes to the workers, and not to speculators and parasites of one sort and another, collectors of interest, dividends, and profits. Very certainly this will not be achieved by letting foreign slave-drivers bring our wages down to their levels..."

Excerpt From Howard Fast's 1946 Essay On Literary Classism

In a May 7, 1946 New Masses article, titled "Toward People's Standards in Art," the then-20th-century proletarian writer Howard Fast indicated why most of the U.S. literature created by U.S. upper-middle-class writers, published by the subsidiaries of global corporate media conglomerates or praised by U.S. upper middle-class academic literary critics doesn't generally accurately portray the reality of U.S. working-class lives or promote the liberation of U.S. working-class people from institutional classism in the 21st-century:

"What shall we say of the standards of the literary esthetes who rule the highest level of our `modern culture?' I think the best one can say is that in most cases they have no standards at all. Their approach to art has taken on all the aspects of a retreat from life, and avoiding life as carefully as they do, they have a moral fear of putting standards into operation.

"They are at a point now where they are entranced by sound. They worship style. Like children, they cavort at cunning phraseology, and their idea of a high intellectual achievement...is the creation of a second-rate pun. They have adopted a canting and formalized literary phraseology, and they are endowing it with a sacredness very like the ritual of a church. They delight in the resultant confusion because confusion does not place upon them the responsibility of sifting facts for the truth. They are enraged if, perchance, progressive critics should point out that Swinburne wrote revolutionary odes; they value only that part of Swinburne which is sound without meaning, and they value Shelley that way, and Keats too.

"One cannot deny that these critical czars have vast material means at their disposal. Each week they coin hundreds of thousands of words of so-called criticism, and with that criticism they establish their own hierarchy of the great, both in practitioners of art and in works of art.

"But are their great the people's heroes? ...I think not...We have accepted too uncritically too many bourgeois idols...

"We today, in the midst of the struggle, must not forget that the bulk of modern writing is not created by the working class or by friends of the working class. We very often have reason to remember that much of it is created by enemies of the people, enemies of progress, enemies of all that we believe in, and by and large those enemies control the critical standards of today.

"Are their standards our standards? Can they ever wholly be our standards? Today, our standards and their standards occasionally will coincide--on a Walt Whitman, for example. But what was the attitude of those people toward Walt Whitman in his day, during his life? They attacked him and slandered him, and even today you cannot read critical journals without finding regular attacks on Whitman, supercilious and snide commentaries on Whitman, and scholarly investigations of the `dubious worth' of Whitman.

"Did these makers of standards approve of Uncle Tom's Cabin?...Did they not malign Dreiser and say that he was a buffoon presuming to art? Did they not condemn Jack London to the hall of mediocrity? Did they not fairly successfully expunge Frank Norris from our literary memory? Did they not deride Upton Sinclair, the early Sinclair whose socialist novels were so magnificent?...

"What is their attitude toward the social writer of today? What will be their attitude toward the social novelists of tomorrow?

"We cannot depend on them, on their concept of artistic truth or worth...,Before art can be wholly a weapon for us we must understand art, both the art of the people and the art which the enemies of the people create and use in one fashion or another to keep the people in subjugation. And, so long as we confuse these two, the people's art and the art created by the enemies of the people, so long as we bow to the decadents, to the mystics, to the cheap literary frauds, art will not be the weapon we want it to be, and the great people's art...will not come into being...

"The art we embrace comes from the people and, at the same time, it is a gift to the people. The people are not grateful for gifts from fascists and other enemies of mankind. Such gifts are not art by our standards... Only death or the seeds of death are sown by such gifts. Even as the people must some day destroy the last seeds of fascism, so must they reject `art' which leads away from life and toward stagnation.

"And when they do so, a new art will emerge, a people's art, judged by people's standards."

Upton Sinclair--Bob A. Feldman

The AP News Trust's Pre-1990's Hidden History Revisited: Part 6

Wikicommons photo by Alterego

The editorial policies of the institutionally racist AP have long been criticized by U.S. antiwar radicals for their pro-U.S. Establishment political biases. In 1912, for instance, U.S. antiwar radical presidential candidate Eugene Debs wrote the following in a letter of protest to the general manager of AP:

“Pardon me if I give you just an instance or two of my personal experience. During the heat of the Pullman strike, when the Pullman cars were under boycott, the Associated Press sent out a dispatch over all the country that I had ridden out of Chicago like a royal prince in a Pullman Palace car while my dupes were left to walk the ties. A hundred witnesses who were at the depot when I left testified that the report was a lie, but I could never get the Associated Press to correct it. This lie cost me more pain and trouble than you can well imagine, and for it all I have to thank the Associated Press, and I have not forgotten it.

“During the last national campaign, at a time when I was away from home, the Associated Press spread a report over the country to the effect that scab labor had been employed to do some work at my home. It was a lie, and so intended. I had the matter investigated by the chief union organizer of the district, who reported that it was a lie, but I was never able to have the correction put upon the wires. That lie is still going to this day, and for that, and still others I could mention, I have also to thank the capitalistically owned and controlled Associated Press.”

After his expose’ of the U.S. meat packing industry in the best-selling 1905 muckraking novel, The Jungle, created some popular pressure for passage of some kind of pure food law, Upton Sinclair attempted to interest AP in sending more news about the unhealthy practices of this industry over the AP wires. But although “The Associated Press was the established channel through which the news was supposed to flow,” according to Upton Sinclair’s The Brass Check, “the channel proved to be a concrete wall…as thick as all the millions of dollars of all the vested interests of America can build it.” According to Sinclair, “I first telephoned, and then sent a letter by special messenger to the proper officials of the Associated Press, but they would have absolutely nothing to do with me or my news” and “Throughout my entire campaign against the Beef Trust, they never sent out a single line injurious to the interests of the packers, save for a few lines dealing with the Congressional hearings, which they could not entirely suppress…”

In a 1937 article, Fortune magazine also noted that in 1926 “an AP reporter, at the insistence of Assistant Secretary of State Olds, wrote a dispatch about the `specter of Mexican-fostered Bolshevik hegemony’ in-between the U.S. and the Panama Canal” which proved to be “a piece of utter claptrap.” Fortune also observed that former Nation publisher Oswald Garrison Villard once declared the AP wire service “constitutionally incapable of doing justice to the underprivileged.”

Associated Press/AP Board of Directors in 21st-century

 (end of part 6)

(The following article originally appeared in the July 7, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly, Downtown).

 

`Upton Sinclair' protest folk song

Michael Gold's 1928 Reflections On Upton Sinclair

In an article that appeared in the November 1928 issue of New Masses magazine, U.S. working-class writer and literary critic Mike Gold wrote the following about the early 20th century U.S. novelist and muckraker Upton Sinclair:

“Sinclair is a surprise to all who first meet him. One expects to meet a solemn bearded Tolstoy, but finds instead a brisk American youth who is quite a star at the game of tennis…


“He is never relaxed…He works. His whole life has been narrowed down to a stiletto point; he is a writing machine. Nothing else matters...He keeps his body in a chair twelve to sixteen hours a day and writes novels, plays, articles, manifestoes, for the Social Revolution. I wish I were like that.


“Every literary youth just out of Harvard…has written at least one superior article…pointing out the stylistic shortcomings of Upton Sinclair…


“Upton has faults….I do not object to what is called his sentimentality….


"Upton has written 40 books about poverty, the class struggle, the revolution. And everyone of them is written with passion, observation, and a smooth beautiful skill that reminds one of Defoe, of Dickens, of Tolstoy, all the giants of fiction whose pens flowed with large, easy grandeur…


“…He is the best known American writer in the world today. American writers marvel at this, but the answer is easy. Upton, with all his faults, has one virtue; he knows there is a class struggle in America, and writes about it. Europe and Asia read him to learn about the America that counts, the workers’ America, not the America of murder trials, boudoirs, and snappy stories.


“Yes, bourgeois critics say Upton Sinclair is not sophisticated…But it all comes down to this; they don’t like him because he takes the social revolution seriously.


“They can understand dead revolutions, and dead revolutionary writers. They can `place’ the revolutionary writings of Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, they can overlook the lack of style and `behavioristic’ psychology in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

“But Upton has written a long string of novels, some good, some bad, in each of which one finds the same faults, and the same virtue and necessity and revolutionary usefulness of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.


“He is our only pioneer writer since Whitman. He is the bard of industrial America.


“…Upton, with his social passion and muckraking, is out of fashion with the American `intelligentsia.’ I think he feels this. He has really been neglected in America and faintly sneered at for twenty-five years. He has felt it. But he writes every day. He persists. He is one of few giants among a scramble of lapdogs. He works on. His very persistence in America is an act of faith, and a form of genius.


“George Sterling told me Jack London did not really die of natural causes, but killed himself with an overdose of morphine tablets…He had been defeated by the American environment. He was a success, and had to earn $40,000 [in early 20th-century money] every year writing Hearst slop. This money was needed for a show ranch, a string of saddle horses, and other means of impressing weekend parties of Babbitts. Jack got to hate himself and his false bourgeois life; then he tried to hate and forget his splendid proletarian youth. He drank like a fish and tried to drown his revolutionary emotions, his real self. Result: suicide…


“But Upton Sinclair will never dream of such a thing; he is too busy. He is too useful…

“...I have never understood Upton Sinclair’s politics. [But] I will repeat, despite everything, he is our great American pioneer in revolutionary fiction, he is, to my mind, the most important writer in America.”

(New Masses, November 1928)

Upton Sinclair's `No Pasaran!'': An Excerpt

U.S. writer Upton Sinclair’s 1937 book, No Pasaran! (They Shall Not Pass): A Story of the Battle of Madrid, includes the following passages:

(“This book is a cry for freedom, and for decency in human affairs. It deals with one of the great heroic episodes of history, now going on.

“The story of a group of American boys who join the International Brigade and stop the Fascists at the gates of Madrid.”)


“This speaker had not merely watched the outbreak of the rebellion, but he had studied its causes, and undertook to explain them. To understand such a struggle, you had to know the economic forces underlying it. Nearly half the land of Spain belonged to the Catholic Church, and the income from it went to keep a horde of parasites, who taught the women and children superstition, and had kept Spain a backward land ever since the days of the Inquisition. Most of the remaining land belonged to landlords, many of whom lived abroad upon the sweated labor of the peasants. Landless workers earned as low as nine cents a day; and the workers of the city were nearly as badly off—the speaker had seen three married couples living in one room not more than ten feet square.

“Against such conditions the people had been fighting for centuries. Of late years they had done what American conservatives all advised; they had trusted to evolution, not revolution, to ballots, not bullets; their political parties had united and elected a majority of the parliament. It was false to say, as most accounts in newspapers did, that the government of Spain was a `Red’ government; there had not been a single Communist nor Socialist in that government; it had been about what the `New Deal’ government of the United States was, and had tried to pass much the same sort of measures.

“But the landlords and aristocrats of Spain, and the higher prelates of the Church, could not endure to see the power pass from their hands; they were no more willing to surrender their privileges to legislative action than they would have been to physical force. The revolt had been an attempt at counter-revolution, backed by all the reactionary elements in the country, and now by those of the whole world. The people of Spain were with the government, and no one knew it better than the Fascist leaders…


“The second speaker was a woman official of a garment-workers’ union. The task assigned her by the chairman was to explain the world meaning of this war—no small task for a small woman…She talked in a matter-of-fact way, without any flights of oratory…


“The process of competition was one in which the big fellows ate up the little ones; it was obvious, said the woman, that this process must break down when the last little one had been eaten. The rich now got so much, and the poor so little, that the latter could no longer purchase the products of industry, and that was a `depression.’ Big business was driven out to seek foreign markets, and that made war in the modern world.


“It also made Fascism, asserted the speaker; the last stage of capitalism before it collapsed from its internal contradictions. When the capitalists could no longer provide jobs for their workers, and saw them on the point of revolting and seizing the industries, they abolished democracy and set up a dictatorship, to suppress the workers at home, and seize colonies and trade advantages abroad. Fascism had been defined as `capitalism plus murder.’


“The Fascist dictatorships had developed a technique, now plainly visible in action. They started propaganda in other countries, and supplied money and ideas to Fascist groups; a revolt was started, and arms and `volunteers’ were sent to set up another Fascist state. Such was the meaning of Spain; and as soon as that job was finished, the technique would be applied to Czechoslovakia. Next it would be the turn of Belgium, France, Holland…One by one the democratic nations would be undermined…


“…In Germany, Italy, and Japan the whole surplus revenue was going into war preparations; they had solved their unemployment problem that way, and if they stopped arming, there would be starvation and chaos. The very process of arming made war inevitable…

“…In the evening Rudy came home and carried out his promise…to read the pamphlet…Rudy had been putting it off night after night, because of a general prejudice against pamphlets. If a writer had anything of important to say, he would put it into a book, and it would carry the imprint of some established publishing house, and would become required reading in Economics 17a. But a cheap pamphlet, written by a nobody, and circulated by amiable dreamers…In either case, the prospect was boredom.


“Rudy had a good mind, but had seldom applied it, except immediately before exams, and then just enough to get a `gentleman’s C.’ Now he buckled down to the pamphlet, and was surprised to find a clear explanation of depressions and what caused them. It seemed too good to be true—that the vast and universal distress of the world could be analyzed so simply, and made so plain, even to a dub like him. The greatest statesmen and editors were baffled by this problem—and here was a solution offered by an obscure Socialist, no doubt some workingman like that marine engineer whom Rudy had heard, or that woman labor leader. It seemed extremely unlikely that they could be right, and he wished his professor of economics were in town, so that he could ask about it. To think for himself was something that appalled him…


“Try as he would, Rudy could not help being impressed by the clearness of this argument, and also of the remedies suggested. He tried to recall all the things his professors had told him about the fallacies of Socialism…He wished he had paid more attention to their lectures, so that he would not feel so helpless now…”

Upton Sinclair On The Politics of U.S. Publishing Industry

In his 1937 message "To the Reader" that preceded the text of his 1937 book about Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company's hidden history, The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America, U.S. left-wing writer Upton Sinclair wrote the following about the politics of the U.S. publising industry:

"Thirty-five years ago I dedicated my life to the cause of justice for the American workers. In the course of those years I have published fifty-nine books and plays. Some have been successes, some failures. When I made money, I have spent it to finance new books, or to circulate the old ones. Nineteen times, by actual count, I have been forced to deal with a new publisher, because my new book was considered too dangerous by the old publisher. On as many occasions I have had to publish the new book myself, because it was too dangerous for any publisher I could find.

"The last experinece was with a novel called No Pasaran! (They Shall Not Pass): A Story of the Battle of Madrid. This was an effort to help the new Spanish democracy, and I sold most of them below cost. The significant fact is that not one of the literary organs of this country, not one of the big newspapers of New York, so much as mentioned the book. Yet it was judged worth publication as a serial by a leading newspaper of Paris, and was advertised on billboards all over that city; in six months it has been published serially in a score of different languages, and has been published or is being prepared in book form in a score of countries. It has been published by the government in Spain, and is being made into a motion picture in Barcelona.

"The books of Upton Sinclair have been issued in more than seven hundred editions in foreign countries, including more than forty different languages, practically all those spoken by civilized peoples. The foreign sales have amounted to more than ten millions. But the job of getting these books to the people in my own country has been a hard one, because books are sold for high prices in America, and the people for whom I write books have little money. Now a new labor movement with enlightened leadership has been born; and this brings me great satisfaction, because I have been calling all my public life for mass unions of the workers. I am glad to have my books read by the men and women who are going to build the happy society in which our children will live, and I am content to get along without the honors and applause which a writer wins by catering to the leisure class booktrade."