Upton Sinclair

The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America

by John Fabian Witt  · 14 Oct 2025  · 735pp  · 279,360 words

, Yiddish-language editor of socialist and labor publications, treasurer of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. John Scopes. High school science teacher, football coach, evolution case defendant. Upton Sinclair. Author of The Jungle (1905), socialist, cofounder of the Garland Fund. Bester William Steele. Locomotive fireman in the Association of Colored Railway Trainmen, litigant at

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receive so early in the day.”3 A few people watching from afar, however, had a more ambitious idea. In Los Angeles, the muckraking author Upton Sinclair, whose bestselling novel The Jungle had publicized the horrors of the meatpacking industry, wrote to Garland with a proposal. Don’t refuse the money, Sinclair

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Maryland, “then we should welcome disaffection and try to remove the causes.” Censorship insulated leaders from accountability for bad decisions. Writing directly to the president, Upton Sinclair made the point with characteristic flair. The superior strategy, Sinclair told Wilson, was not to suppress dangerous speech with the force “of the policeman’s

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was simply “biding his time.” In the end, the case for an alteration in Holmes’s approach seems to me to be stronger. The writer Upton Sinclair, at right, picketing outside the offices of John D. Rockefeller Jr., in 1914. 4 Freedom and Economics My sense of democracy is alienated by the

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. In 1913, the family settled for a charter from New York State.27 * * * Anger over the Rockefeller fortune surged anew in the aftermath of Ludlow. Upton Sinclair saw the massacre as another outbreak of the horrors of the “wage slavery” he had documented a decade before in the slaughterhouses of Chicago for

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“muddy the waters” around the Colorado controversy to obscure its founders’ responsibility. When Creel attacked Lee and his fellow flacks as “poisoners of public opinion,” Upton Sinclair incorporated the idea into a moniker that stuck. “Poison Ivy” Lee, Sinclair called him. Two years later, Sinclair published a novel—King Coal—that aimed

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the minds of Americans seemed to work. And so, proceeding in parallel at first, and only later coming together as a team, Roger Baldwin and Upton Sinclair turned in earnest to raising funds of their own.44 Fund directors Freda Kirchwey (far right) and Lewis Gannett (back row at center with mustache

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saw a use for the money that would reveal it not to be too small after all.15 A Trust Fund for Pioneering Enterprises When Upton Sinclair read about Garland’s inheritance in the Los Angeles papers, he reached out to the young man with an idea. The self-described propagandist and

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politics. The guests at Johnson’s soiree were participants in the worlds of art and story and information to which observers like Walter Lippmann and Upton Sinclair had attributed so much power during and after the war. They were producers of ideas and images that bid to organize modern life. So, as

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. Subsidizing Federated Press, moreover, allowed the Fund’s directors to respond directly to the concerns that had helped inspire the Fund in the first place. Upton Sinclair had argued to the founding directors in the fall of 1922 that the “main trouble with our situation at the present time” was that “the

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Fund-sponsored radio station would not attract enough listeners unless it emphasized music and entertainment over labor or radical content. The “serious stuff,” Baldwin told Upton Sinclair, had to be “fed in small doses in between.” Without what Baldwin called “commercial appeal,” radical radio seemed to its critics like an echo chamber

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A second sign of the Party’s influence was Vanguard Press. The Fund had first pursued the idea of a publishing house in 1922 when Upton Sinclair urged it to establish a publisher to keep his own books in print. The Fund turned him down. But the possibility of establishing a publishing

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constabulary.” Real industrial democracy, he insisted, required workers capable of assuming the mature responsibilities that came with control.36 David Saposs, who like Lippmann and Upton Sinclair studied propaganda and public opinion in the Pittsburgh steel strike after the war, won American Fund grants to write a book excoriating the IWW and

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Morss Lovett, for example, ran the League for Industrial Democracy, which had been established in 1905 as the Intercollegiate Socialist Society by American Fund founder Upton Sinclair. (It was the League whose tax case paralleled that of the Fund.) By the 1920s the League served as a node in the extended new

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more than provide information. Education shaped the consciousness and identity of its holders. Such were the lessons of Lippmann’s studies of the newspapers and Upton Sinclair’s broadsides against the commercial press. The news blackout in the Pittsburgh steel strike in 1919 had shown much the same thing. In Europe, social

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voted for Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate, as voted for Woodrow Wilson. Debs’s socialism appealed to Randolph. He soon joined the campus chapter of Upton Sinclair’s Intercollegiate Socialist Society and participated in campus protests on behalf of striking textile workers in Lawrence and Paterson. At lectures and rallies, he encountered

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Industrial Democracy, to “discuss the prime issues of the day.” The club’s reading list was a veritable who’s who of American Fund authors: Upton Sinclair, whose exhortations to Charles Garland had spurred the Fund’s establishment; Scott Nearing and Norman Thomas, who served on the board; Stuart Chase, the labor

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mass politics of public opinion. 3 When a young Cape Cod heir named Charles Garland rejected his million-dollar inheritance with much fanfare, the writer Upton Sinclair reached out to him by letter from Pasadena (above) to propose an alternative propaganda stunt: accept the money and establish a foundation. 4 5 After

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inheritance, he quietly accepted it. “Garland Brothers to Accept Millions,” Boston Daily Globe, Jan. 10, 1922, 8. 4. Upton Sinclair: Upton Sinclair to CG, Dec. 2, 1920; Dec. 29, 1920; Jan. 8, 1921; Jan. 15, 1921; Upton Sinclair to Mrs. CG, Dec. 29, 1920, all in b. 5, JPCC; “Crank No. 1426,” Los Angeles Times, Jan

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. 29, 1921, 1–14. Sinclair recommended: Upton Sinclair to CG, Jan. 10, 1922, b. 9, f. 13, RNBP. met on the Cape: RNB, “A Memo on Charles Garland,” Feb. 1975, b. 25, f.

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of Representatives, Sixty-Fifth Congress, First Session, on H.R. 291, April 9 and 12, 1917 (Government Printing Office, 1917), at 37. “Weapons of Truth”: Upton Sinclair to Woodrow Wilson, Oct. 22, 1917; WW to Joseph Patrick Tumulty, Oct. 30, 1917, both in Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 44 (Princeton University Press

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one for advancing the Rockefeller goal of minimizing regulatory meddling. See Roberta Romano, The Genius of American Corporate Law (AEI Press, 1993). 28. “wage slavery”: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (Doubleday, Page, 1906). “upon a charge of murder”: Chernow, Titan, 579. “shoot him down”: Fosdick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., 152–53. Protesters: Chernow

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Taints,” 289. “poisoners”: George Creel, “Poisoners of Public Opinion,” Harper’s Weekly, Nov. 7, 1914, 436–38. “Poison Ivy”: Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism (Upton Sinclair, 1920), 311. a novel: Upton Sinclair, King Coal: A Novel (Macmillan, 1917). 39. “missed”: “Gives Rockefeller Lesson in Finance,” New York Times, Sept. 23, 1915

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World, Nov. 29, 1920, 6. 15. drop in the bucket… legitimate: “Garland Still Scorns Riches,” New York Sun, June 18, 1921, 6. 16. reached out: Upton Sinclair to CG, Dec. 2, 1920; US to CG, Dec. 29, 1920, both in b. 5, JCP. “weapon”: Woodrow Wilson to Joseph Patrick Tumulty, Oct. 30

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House, 2007), 177. “invisible”: Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (W. Strahan & T. Cadell, 1776); bestseller… “National News”: Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism (Upton Sinclair, 1920), 436–38. 18. “congratulate… honest weekly”: US to CG, Dec. 2, 1920, b. 5, JCP. 19. ready reply & admired The Brass Check: CG to

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. 31. bowed out: Charles Garland Correspondence, b. 25, JPCC. his own projects: See, e.g., Upton Sinclair, 1922, b. 5, r. 3, AFPSR; Recommendations Made by the Committee on Applications, Jan. 24, 1924, r. 1, AFPSR; Upton Sinclair to Merle Curti, Sep. 22, 1958, MECP. “kingpin”: Norman Thomas to Merle Curti, Apr. 22, 1958

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groups: Gifts to June 30, 1941, 44, r. 5, AFPSR (Theatre Union). fiction writers: Personal Service Fund Gifts, 1923–1925, r. 11, AFPSR (Claude McKay, Upton Sinclair). film producers: Minutes of the Board of Directors, Feb. 25, 1937, f. 4, AFPSR (Share Croppers Film Committee); Share Croppers Film Committee, 1937, r. 24

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Directors, Jan. 17, 1923, r. 3, AFPSR. just over $81,000: Gifts to June 30, 1941, 17, r. 5, AFPSR. “do not get the facts”: Upton Sinclair to RNB, Nov. 25, 1922, r. 32, AFPSR. 31. radio station, WCFL: Nathan Godfried, WCFL: Chicago’s Voice of Labor, 1926–1978 (University of Illinois

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Hour”… Labor Looks at the Week … labor conditions… Federated Press… Rand School: Fones-Wolf, Waves of Opposition, 22. 35. “fed in small doses”: RNB to Upton Sinclair, May 27, 1930, r. 12, b. 18, AFPSR. 36. “musical programs”: Cohen, Making a New Deal, 20. WCFL: Nathan Godfried, “The Origins of Labor Radio

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Board, Mar. 7, 1934, r. 4, AFPSR. default: Russian Reconstruction Farms, r. 21, AFPSR. 42. keep his own books in print: Upton Sinclair, 1922, b. 5, r. 3, AFPSR. publishing house: Upton Sinclair, 1934, r. 32, AFPSR. “Vanguard of thought” & “regular publishers are not prepared”: AFPS, Funding of Vanguard Press, b. 6, f. 5

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. 53, VPR. For positive assessments of Vanguard’s early work by Baldwin and Sinclair, see RNB, Reminiscences of Roger Baldwin, 1953–1954, at 328, and Upton Sinclair to Merle Curti, Sept. 22, 1958, MECP. 45. “permanent educational value”: Gloria Garrett Samson, The American Fund for Public Service: Charles Garland and Radical Philanthropy

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. Baldwin singled out Vanguard Press, of whose books he said, “I have no doubt they did good.” Ibid. Upton Sinclair agreed, asserting to Merle Curti that “those cheap little radical classics had an immense effect.” Upton Sinclair to Merle Curti, Sept. 22, 1958, MECP. 14. retired… died: “Roger Baldwin, 97, Is Dead; Crusader for

An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood

by Neal Gabler  · 17 Nov 2010  · 622pp  · 194,059 words

the butcher the idea to give me that meat because He knew that he was going to be taken care of?” he asked his biographer, Upton Sinclair. “During any calamity that befell me, it was always made clear to me that it wasn’t any ability that I possessed that straightened me

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of the greatest of the Jewish agglomerators, William Fox. Though Fox at the time occupied a place well below the industry’s summit, his biographer, Upton Sinclair, admitted that he “planned to get all the moving picture theaters in the United States under his control sooner or later.… I think also that

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, in a sense, I felt I wanted to attach myself to history.… ROBERT ROSSEN, DIRECTOR Utopia is the opiate of the Jewish people. LUDWIG LEWISOHN UPTON SINCLAIR DID NOT SEEM to be the sort of man who would shake the foundations of American civilization the way he might have shaken oranges out

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of another project, tried begging off, but his wife, “who knew the smell of money when it came near,” accepted in his behalf. And so Upton Sinclair embarked upon a lengthy attack on the movie and banking interests who had ganged up on William Fox. Three times a week Fox would arrive

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, the industry raised nearly half a million dollars for the cause—most of it by exacting two days’ wages from each employee. “This campaign against Upton Sinclair has been and is dynamite,” exulted The Hollywood Reporter eleven days before the election. “When the picture business gets aroused, it becomes AROUSED, and boy

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, and left-wing political sentiment intensified. Screenwriter Albert Hackett quipped that Louis B. Mayer had “created more Communists than Karl Marx.” In some inchoate way, Upton Sinclair’s campaign a year later became a flashpoint for the divisions between capital and labor, assuming symbolic proportions far greater than Sinclair’s own election

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Jews particularly, to contempt, guilt, and sin there was one last, cleansing alternative, and that was politics. “It started with much fewer people in the Upton Sinclair campaign,” recalled Philip Dunne, “and then in 1936, when the Spanish Civil War started, that was the catalyst.… All of a sudden people like Ernest

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The Gold Diggers of 1933, or Footlight Parade, where the chorus forms ranks in a pictogram of Roosevelt and then the NRA eagle. *It was Upton Sinclair who later raised funds so that Eisenstein could go to Mexico to make an epic about primitive Indians there. After shooting thousands of feet of

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his exchanges by Universal for over $1 million. 60 “Holler the loudest…” Ramsaye, p. 478. 61 “I was working for …”; “My father was…” Quoted in Upton Sinclair, Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox (Los Angeles, 1933), pp. 17, 18–19. This book, dictated to Sinclair by Fox, is the only detailed account of Fox’s

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,” The New Yorker, April 30, 1932, p. 25. 117 “We were the first ones down…” SM. 118 “Planned to get all the moving picture theaters…” Upton Sinclair, Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox (Los Angeles, 1933), p. 73. 119 One partner in a West Coast theater chain … Sol Lesser Oral History, Columbia University Oral History

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Ghetto and Beyond, ed. Peter Isaac Rose (New York, 1969), p. 443. 4 “He has barely got started …” Upton Sinclair, I, Governor of California (Los Angeles, 1934), p. 2, quoted in Lewis A. Fretz, “Upton Sinclair: The Don Quixote of American Reform,” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1970, p. 157 5 He was thought

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Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval (Boston, 1960), pp. 118–19. 6 “A quiet, slight figure…” New York Times, September 9, 1934, quoted in Leon Harris, Upton Sinclair: American Rebel (New York, 1975), p. 371. 7 “Keep that Bolshevik away…” Sam Marx, interviewed by author. 8 “I was present, but was not called

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…” Letter from Sinclair to Lewis Browne in Upton Sinclair, My Life in Letters (Columbia, MO, 1960), p. 265. 9 “He’s had his fill of politics.” Letter from Craig Sinclair to Mrs. John Kling

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, n.d., in Harris, p. 270. 10 “I don’t think I’m egotistical…” Upton Sinclair, “The Movies and Political Propaganda,” in The Movies on Trial, ed. William J. Perlman (New York, 1936), p. 189. 11 “Humble and obedient

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…” Upton Sinclair interview, Columbia University Oral History Collection, vol. 2. no. 502, p. 213. 12 “Who knew the smell of money …” Upton Sinclair, The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (New York, 1962), pp. 274–75. 13 “And what happened then?” Sinclair, Autobiography, pp

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either of these rights.” July 28, 1933, Sinclair Manuscripts, Manuscript Department, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. 314 False stories. James Lambert Harte, This Is Upton Sinclair (Emmaus, PA, 1938), p. 53. 14 “Not as yet.” New York Herald Tribune, October 6, 1934. 15 Newsreels. New York Times, November 4, 1934, quoted

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estimated that $10 million was spent to defeat Sinclair. Charles W. Van Devander, The Big Bosses (New York, 1944), p. 297. 18 “This campaign against Upton Sinclair has been and is dynamite.” Ibid., p. 194. 19 “I made those shorts.” Kyle Crichton, Total Recoil (Garden City, NY, 1960), pp. 245–46. 20

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Post, October 10, 1934. 88 He had spent over $1 million … Variety, October 23, 1934. 89 “Very slippery fellow.” H. L. Mencken to Upton Sinclair, April 4, 1933, in Upton Sinclair, My Lifetime in Letters (Columbia, MO, 1960), p. 320. 90 Rather than leave his bankruptcy proceedings to chance … Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, May

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. Roosevelt Presidential Library at Hyde Park, New York; the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library at West Branch, Iowa; the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston; the Upton Sinclair Papers at Indiana University in Bloomington; the Maine Historical Society; the American Jewish Historical Society in Waltham, Massachusetts; the Western Jewish History Center of the

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. Freedland, Michael. The Warner Brothers. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. French, Philip. The Movie Moguls. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969. Fretz, Lewis A. “Upton Sinclair: The Don Quixote of American Reform.” Ph.D. diss. Stanford University, 1970. Friedman, Lester D. Hollywood’s Image of the Jew. New York: Ungar, 1982

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, Benjamin. History of the American Film Industry: From Its Beginnings to 1931. New York: Covici-Friede, 1931; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1970. Harris, Leon. Upton Sinclair: American Rebel. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1975. Hecht, Ben. Charlie: The Improbable Life and Times of Charles MacArthur. New York: Harper & Bros., 1957

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; New York: Avon, 1973. Selznick, Irene Mayer. A Private View. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983. Sinclair, Upton. The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962. ______. Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox. Los Angeles: by the author, 1933. Sklar, Robert. Movie-Mode America: A Cultural History of American Movies. New York

Swindled: the dark history of food fraud, from poisoned candy to counterfeit coffee

by Bee Wilson  · 15 Dec 2008  · 384pp  · 122,874 words

Europe. The United States soon followed suit— with the horrors of the New York swill milk scandal in the 1850s and the gruesome jungle of Upton Sinclair’s Packingtown in the early 1900s. This pattern of early endemic adulteration explains something of America’s predicament with food, up to the present day

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groundwork for the 1906 law, the immediate impetus came from a much less probable source—an unheralded novel written by a nervous young socialist named Upton Sinclair. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sinclair’s name is absent from Wiley’s autobiography. Wiley’s part in the story is not yet finished; we will return to

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him later in this chapter. But the man of the hour in 1906 was Upton Sinclair. It was because of the unprecedented impact of his novel The Jungle that even the most diehard opponents of government intervention in the food business

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cowed into submission. Sinclair brought the public debate about food to such a pitch of anxiety and disgust that federal legislation was the only answer. Upton Sinclair, Th eodore Roosevelt, and The Jungle The Jungle tells the story of Jurgis, a Lithuanian who comes to America with his family to be a

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pain that life had meant to me.”130 In one of the few things he had in common A poster for the film version of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. with Wiley, Sinclair also saw the fight against adulteration as a continuation of the previous generation’s fight against slavery; several prominent

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packers had a second and much stronger pickle which destroyed the odor—a process known to the workers as “giving them Hams being doctored in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. thirty per cent.” Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly

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view, was twofold. First, he had to ascertain whether the shocking revelations it contained were true. Second, he had to do his best to ignore Upton Sinclair’s emotional brand of politics. On 15 March 1906, Roosevelt wrote to Sinclair from Washington telling him that he had read “if not all, yet

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had a ghost of a chance to become a law—certainly not this session. Its passage is the direct consequence of the disclosures made in Upton Sinclair’s novel, ‘The Jungle.’ ”158 On 30 June, Roosevelt signed it into law. For Sinclair himself, the Beveridge bill was hopelessly inadequate, “like plugging up

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. “pure food centre of the world,” trumpeted a long article in the Chicago Daily Tribune on 25 February 1907, the same paper that had slated Upton Sinclair only a year earlier. This has led some historians to see the bill as fundamentally corrupt—as a story of “business control over politics,” as

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Feast, a blistering attack on the American food supply and the FDA’s failure to police it. Nader directly compared his work to that of Upton Sinclair. “We’re Still in the Jungle” was the title of an essay from 1967. Like Sinclair, he ruthlessly exposed the fact that the meatpacking industry

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substance or is otherwise unfit for food.” As we saw in chapter 4, the Pure Food and Drugs Act was drafted in the aftermath of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and the “filth” the lawmakers had in mind was the kind of unsanitary goings-on Sinclair uncovered among the Chicago meatpackers: diseased

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labelling. The press has always played a role in exposing food fraud, which has been heightened at various times through the work of muckrakers, from Upton Sinclair to Ralph Nader. In addition, we now have whole dictionaries of information about food at our disposal in the form of labelling. The right kind

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North Carolina Press, 2000). Degnan, Frederick H., “Rethinking the GRAS Concept,” Food and Drug Law Journal, vol. 46 (1991): 553–82. Denby, Daniel, “Uppie Redux? Upton Sinclair’s Losses and Triumphs,” New Yorker, 28 August 2006. Dillon, Patrick, Gin: The Much-Lamented Death of Madame Geneva, the Eighteenth-Century Gin Craze (Boston

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(1997): 135–58. Goodwin, Lorine Swainston, The Pure Food, Drink and Drug Crusaders, 1879–1914 (London: McFarland, 1999). Gottesman, Ronald, “Introduction” to The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). Gray, Ernest A., By Candlelight: The Life of Arthur Hill Hassall, 1817–94 (London: Robert Hale, 1983). Greenaway, Frank (ed.), The Archives

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Adulteration of Spices,” Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery (1993), pp. 247–53. Sinclair, Upton, The Jungle ( London: T. Werner Laurie, 1906). ———, The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (London: W. H. Allen, 1963). Singer, Peter, and Jim Mason, Eating: Why We Eat What We Eat and Why It Matters (London: Arrow Books, 2006

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Southampton, vol. 2, A Fourteenth-Century Version of the Medieval Sea-Laws Known as the Rolls of Oleron (Southampton: Cox & Sharland, 1911). Suh, Suk Bong, Upton Sinclair and The Jungle (Seoul: American Studies Institute, 1997). Sullivan, Mark, Our Times: The United States, 1900–1925, vol. 2 (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

by William Cronon  · 2 Nov 2009  · 918pp  · 260,504 words

frightening thing he saw at the stockyards, and made him worry about the effect of so mechanical a killing house on the human soul. As Upton Sinclair would remark in the most famous passage ever written about the place, “One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning

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remained one of the smelliest and most environmentally degraded neighborhoods in all of Chicago, and the water that flowed from its sewers was extraordinarily foul. Upton Sinclair could still describe Bubbly Creek in 1906 as “a great open sewer a hundred or two feet wide” in which grease and chemicals underwent “all

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the effectiveness of their criticisms. Public fears about the health hazards of dressed beef and its by-products did not finally explode until 1906, when Upton Sinclair published his muckraking novel The Jungle and Congress passed the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug Acts, which subsequently imposed much stricter inspection standards

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on the packers and their products.174 Waste, then, was one of the symbolic paradoxes of meat-packing in Chicago. For those like Upton Sinclair who saw in the city all that was most evil in capitalism, Packingtown represented the decline of corporate morality and the end of an earlier

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this world. A sunken city of blood.” 17.Ibid., 118. Other classic descriptions of Chicago in which smoke or odor plays a key role include Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906; reprint, 1960), 29–30; and Robert Herrick, Memoirs of an American Citizen (1905), ed. Daniel Aaron (1963), 266. 18.Rudyard Kipling, undoubtedly

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the World (1894), 70–71. 3.“Metropolis of the Prairies,” 730. 4.Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel (1899), 2:153. 5.Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906; reprint, 1960), 40. 6.The most comprehensive modern history of the yards is Louise Carroll Wade, Chicago’s Pride: The Stockyards, Packingtown

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one can reasonably doubt that this was the most important part of the problem. 174.On the writing of Sinclair’s book, see Christine Scriabine, “Upton Sinclair and the Writing of The Jungle, “Chicago History 10, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 26–37. On the hazards of rural butchering, see Ch. Wardell Stiles

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the West.” Hunt’s Merch. Mag. 14 (1846): 163–65. ———. “Westward the Star of Empire.” De Bow’s Review 27 (1859): 125–36. Scriabine, Christine. “Upton Sinclair and the Writing of The Jungle.” Chicago History 10, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 26–37. Sheldon, j. P. “Report on the American and Canadian Meat

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America

by Jamie Bronstein  · 29 Oct 2016  · 332pp  · 89,668 words

like Francis Townsend, whose ideas shaped Social Security, and politicians and political candidates like Louisiana governor Huey Long (Share Our Wealth) and California gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair (End Poverty in California) pushed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to pursue a more radical Second New Deal. The Republican Party, the business community, and the Supreme

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Muckraking journalists exposed many of the shortcomings of American life. Some were more concerned with political corruption than with corporate corruption, but some, including journalists Upton Sinclair and Charles Edward Russell, became avowed socialists after learning about the conditions of the urban poor.16 In 1912, the Commission on Industrial Relations convened

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, whose ideas shaped Social Security, and politicians and political candidates like Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long (Share Our Wealth) and novelist and progressive activist Upton Sinclair (End Poverty in California) challenged Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal from the left. While Republicans attempted to portray Roosevelt as a raging Marxist, the

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provided each senior with a $200 pension. Although it was defeated during the legislative process, the bill contributed to the creation of Social Security.46 Upton Sinclair also criticized the New Deal for not going far enough. Author of The Jungle, that famous exposé of Chicago’s meatpacking industry and its impact

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would wither away when faced with the enormous financial success of the cooperatives. In essence, Sinclair’s EPIC proposed slow-motion socialism, achieved without violence. Upton Sinclair clubs formed around the state in response to these proposals. His supporters included the destitute elderly, young people who were involved in starting some of

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,” European Journal of the History of Economic Ideas vol. 20 no. 4 (2013): 646–665, at 657–658. 42. George R. Rising, “An EPIC Endeavor: Upton Sinclair’s 1934 California Gubernatorial Campaign,” Southern California Quarterly vol. 79 no. 1 (Spring 1997): 101–124. 43. Ray Argyle, “The Last Utopians,” Beaver vol. 87

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. Daniel J. B. Mitchell, “Townsend and Roosevelt: Lessons from the Struggle for Elderly Income Support,” Labor History vol. 42 no. 3 (2001) 255–276. 47. Upton Sinclair, I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future (Los Angeles, CA: Poverty League, 1933), 15; see also Rising

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, “Sinclair’s 1934 Gubernatorial Campaign,” 105. 48. Sinclair, I, Governor of California, 37. 49. Ibid., 43. 50. Ibid., 52. 51. Fay M. Blake, “Upton Sinclair’s EPIC Campaign,” California History vol. 63 no. 4 (1984): 305–312; Rising, “Sinclair’s 1934 Gubernatorial Campaign,” 116. 52. Daniel Hanne, “ ‘Ham and Eggs

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of Jackson.” Journal of the Early Republic 3, no. 3 (1983): 297–318. Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward. New York: Penguin Classics, 1982. Blake, Fay M. “Upton Sinclair’s EPIC Campaign.” California History 63, no. 4 (1984): 305–312. Bloodworth, Jeff. “ ‘The Program for Better Jobs and Income’: Welfare Reform, Liberalism, and the

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

by Steven Johnson  · 28 Sep 2014  · 243pp  · 65,374 words

since the Ice Age glaciers began their final retreat.” The Chicago stockyards that emerged in the last two decades of the nineteenth century were, as Upton Sinclair wrote, “the greatest aggregation of labor and capital ever gathered in one place.” Fourteen million animals were slaughtered in an average year. In many ways

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food” advocates begins with the Chicago stockyards and the web of ice-cooled transport that extended out from those grim feedlots and slaughterhouses. Progressives like Upton Sinclair painted Chicago as a kind of Dante’s Inferno of industrialization, but in reality, most of the technology employed in the stockyards would have been

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apt to be filled with what squeamish citizens called chowder.” Workmen make progress on the Metropolitan Line underground railway works at King’s Cross, London. Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle is generally considered to be the most influential literary work in the muckraking tradition of political activism. Part of the power

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

by Robert J. Gordon  · 12 Jan 2016  · 1,104pp  · 302,176 words

and grit from the baker’s machinery.”57 Worse yet were standard practices in the meat industry. The most famous protest against these conditions was Upton Sinclair’s famous 1906 The Jungle, an account of the grisly conditions of production and employment in the Chicago meat-packing industry. He described unsanitary conditions

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a reporter, “A man stands about as good a chance of being struck by lightning as of buying pure brandy in New York.”47 Anticipating Upton Sinclair’s unsettling exposé of the Chicago stockyards in 1906, the New York Council of Hygiene reported in 1869 that foods hung on racks or placed

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legislation. The grand climax of the fight between the reformers and the abusive profit-oriented suppliers of adulteration and contamination came suddenly. In February 1906, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was published. A semifictionalized account of health and working conditions in the Chicago stockyards, The Jungle was intended by Sinclair to be

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behind coal mining for abysmal working conditions were jobs in the great slaughterhouses of Chicago and elsewhere, already described in chapter 7 in connection with Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle and the passage in 1906 of the Pure Food and Drug Act. From the moment workers entered the plants, they were

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legislation, as discussed in chapter 7. The 1906 act was a remarkably rapid legislative response to the appalling conditions in the Chicago stockyards described in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. What Sinclair revealed about the inner workings of the stockyards was matched by Ida Tarbell’s muckraking exposé of John D. Rockefeller

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

by Bhu Srinivasan  · 25 Sep 2017  · 801pp  · 209,348 words

faced the immediate challenge of absorbing this endless influx. Never had so many different languages been sizably introduced into the country at the same time. Upton Sinclair’s novel told the story of a broad-shouldered, bull-like Lithuanian immigrant named Jurgis Rudkus. Fueled by optimism and lured by tales of endless

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in the world, allowed him ownership of a car, the product of his own output in the Marxian sense. This egalitarianism, a counterargument to the Upton Sinclairs of the world, cemented capitalism as the American way, its defenders to be found across economic strata. Twenty-two RADIO By 1912 Philadelphia’s Wanamaker

…

, series E 136–151 (Meat—Slaughtering, Production, and Price: 1899 to 1945), 102. “twenty-five years ago”: Armour, “Packing Industry,” 338. “Here was the chute”: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906; repr., Ann Arbor, MI: Borders Classics, 2006), 37. “organic matter was wasted”: Ibid., 44. “eat his dinner”: Ibid., 89. “did not shiver

…

with the muckrake”: Theodore Roosevelt, “Fifth Annual Message,” December 1905, American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara. “misbranded and adulterated”: Ibid. “I would suggest”: Upton Sinclair to President Theodore Roosevelt, March 10, 1906, National Archives, Identifier: 301981, Record Group 16. “possession of the facts”: “Sinclair Gives Proof of Meat Trust Frauds

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception

by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller and Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller  · 21 Sep 2015  · 274pp  · 93,758 words

the lobbying of the regulatory agencies, not to mention lobbying of state and local governments. SIX Phood, Pharma, and Phishing In 1906 the upstart novelist Upton Sinclair intruded on the public’s peace of mind. He wrote a novel, The Jungle, based on the meatpacking houses of Chicago. His intent was to

…

the buyer’s family. In chapter 6, we saw another example of this symbiosis between concerns for workers’ conditions and for product safety. Recall that Upton Sinclair had set out in The Jungle to expose the wage-slave labor of the Chicago meatpacking houses. But the public was especially shocked by the

…

, 2012, accessed November 18, 2014, http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/06rastg12overvw.pdf. Chapter Six: Phood, Pharma, and Phishing 1. Anthony Arthur, Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair (New York: Random House, 2006), Kindle locations 883–86 out of 7719; also 912–16. 2. When Sinclair was threatened with a lawsuit by J

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of what I have charged ought, if it is false, to be enough to send me to prison.” New York Times, May 6, 1906. 3. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (Mineola, NY: Dover Thrift Editions, 2001; originally published 1906), p. 112, for poisoned rats in sausage; p. 82, for the remains in the

…

, Kenneth J., and Gerard Debreu. “Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy.” Econometrica 22, no. 3 (July 1954): 265–90. Arthur, Anthony. Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair. New York: Random House, 2006. Kindle. Asquith, Paul, David W. Mullins Jr., and Eric D. Wolff. “Original Issue High Yield Bonds: Aging Analyses of Defaults

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by Marion Nestle  · 1 Jan 2010  · 736pp  · 147,021 words

food safety system and how politics gets in the way of efforts to improve the system. Having no illusions that the book would do what Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle accomplished in 1906, I hoped that it would at least generate some creative thinking about food safety problems and their solutions. I

…

reform laws to improve the safety of other foods. Nevertheless, federal involvement in food safety remained minimal.40 This complacency ended abruptly in 1906 when Upton Sinclair published his dramatic exposé of the meat industry, The Jungle. Two years earlier, the editor of a Midwestern populist weekly had recruited Sinclair to do

…

inspection. Congress held hearings to review such complaints. At the hearings, meat inspectors raised vehement objections. With a graphic description worthy of Lafcadio Hearn or Upton Sinclair, Delmer Jones, the president of the inspectors’ union, explained why his group believed that daily visual inspections of meat plants must continue. The problem, he

…

temperature records but seemed entirely uninterested in the production process (a serious weakness, as I will explain). One plant employee confided to me—shades of Upton Sinclair—that “someone could be butchering a dog in front of them [the inspectors], and they wouldn’t have a clue.” Because the first of the

…

in remote areas of the West. The industry culture also reflects what the meat industry itself is about—the slaughter of animals for food. As Upton Sinclair so graphically explained, much of the work of this industry is “stupefying and brutalizing.” Despite reforms, more recent observers like Eric Schlosser continue to find

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Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets

by David J. Leinweber  · 31 Dec 2008  · 402pp  · 110,972 words

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike

by Eugene W. Holland  · 1 Jan 2009  · 265pp  · 15,515 words

The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law

by Timothy Sandefur  · 16 Aug 2010  · 399pp  · 155,913 words

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages

by Carlota Pérez  · 1 Jan 2002

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World

by Steven Johnson  · 15 Nov 2016  · 322pp  · 88,197 words

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

by Bhaskar Sunkara  · 1 Feb 2019  · 324pp  · 86,056 words

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America

by Sarah Kendzior  · 24 Apr 2015  · 172pp  · 48,747 words

Assassination Vacation

by Sarah Vowell  · 28 Mar 2005  · 208pp  · 69,863 words

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough

by Peter Barnes  · 31 Jul 2014  · 151pp  · 38,153 words

Hunger: The Oldest Problem

by Martin Caparros  · 14 Jan 2020  · 684pp  · 212,486 words

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

by Rory Sutherland  · 6 May 2019  · 401pp  · 93,256 words

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914

by Richard J. Evans  · 31 Aug 2016  · 976pp  · 329,519 words

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business

by Ken Auletta  · 4 Jun 2018  · 379pp  · 109,223 words

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

by Robert W. McChesney  · 5 Mar 2013  · 476pp  · 125,219 words

Having and Being Had

by Eula Biss  · 15 Jan 2020  · 199pp  · 61,648 words

The Big Score

by Michael S. Malone  · 20 Jul 2021

The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers

by Richard McGregor  · 8 Jun 2010

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

by John C. Bogle  · 1 Jan 2007  · 356pp  · 51,419 words

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

by Franklin Foer  · 31 Aug 2017  · 281pp  · 71,242 words

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy

by Lawrence Lessig  · 5 Nov 2019  · 404pp  · 115,108 words

Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress--And How to Bring It Back

by Marc J Dunkelman  · 17 Feb 2025  · 454pp  · 134,799 words

More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

by Adam Becker  · 14 Jun 2025  · 381pp  · 119,533 words

The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

by Ian Urbina  · 19 Aug 2019

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War

by Jeff Sharlet  · 21 Mar 2023  · 308pp  · 97,480 words

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider

by Michiko Kakutani  · 20 Feb 2024  · 262pp  · 69,328 words

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US

by Rana Foroohar  · 5 Nov 2019  · 380pp  · 109,724 words

Flight of the WASP

by Michael Gross  · 562pp  · 177,195 words

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All

by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares  · 15 Sep 2025  · 215pp  · 64,699 words