3am REGULARS
FAT MAN ON THE LEFT IV - UPTON SINCLAIR'S HOME AT THE EDGE OF TOWN
"After The Jungle, Sinclair couldn't do anything without it showing up in the penny-dreadful New York 'yellow press.' By 1908 he was close to a nervous breakdown. His breakup with his first wife, Meta, had become lurid headlines everywhere he went. At the same time, George Sterling, who seems to have been a friend of every important California writer of the day -- from Jack London to Robinson Jeffers -- was trying to get Sinclair to come west. So was another socialist, millionaire H. Gaylord Wilshire, after whom Los Angeles' Wilshire Boulevard was named. Wilshire had a gold mine in the Sierra, whose two unusual main features were plenty of 'high wages and socialist propaganda.' Sinclair finally came west and stayed in the Sierra and in Carmel.”
by Lionel Rolfe
COPYRIGHT © 2003, 3 A.M. MAGAZINE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The nearly 80-year-old mansion at the end of Myrtle Avenue in Monrovia, California, refurbished and glowing with a new coat of paint and resting in the sun and shade at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, does not look like a place where important world literary history was once played out.
But a federal historical landmark plaque confirms it was so.
On a recent weekend, Mitchell and Kathleen Lardner moved into the home at 464 North Myrtle, for which they paid nearly three-quarters-of-a-million dollars, well aware that they would be living in an historical landmark that for more than two decades was the home of the great writer and muckraker Upton Sinclair.
"We feel very fortunate to be custodians of this property and we are planning to be generous with this house and sharing it once we're settled in," she said. The last owners tended to be reclusive, she said.
Lardner was born in Monrovia and she and her husband, a high-tech venture capitalist, are involved in Monrovia's craftsmen-era home preservation movement. They lived in a craftsman-era home before throwing in with the 2,380-square foot Spanish Colonial Revival-style dwelling, replete with parapet and a front door with a big "V" in the bronze grillwork. "V" was for Louis B. Vollmer, the hotelier for whom the home was built in 1923.
Vollmer sold the home to the Sinclairs in 1941. Sinclair wanted a place where he could safely store his books and papers and the home had double concrete walls with lots of reinforcing steel.
Lardner always knew that the Sinclair home was special, even though she didn't know a lot about the man. She had a high school friend in the neighborhood and used to walk by it, dreaming that one day she would live there. It was only in April of last year when the house came on the market and the Lardners made a succesful bid, did she study Sinclair's life in more detail.
She remembered the home as being almost not visible behind the trees and bushes. Sinclair had planted lots of eugenia trees, which appeared to her to be "very messy berry bushes in front of the property at the edge of town," she said. He also disconnected the front door bell to protect his privacy -- and Lardner says in his honor she will probably leave it that way.
Sinclair's home was also not out of the slick pages of a glossy magazine -- material things were not meaninful to him. Most of his furniture was used. And until he married his last wife, Sinclair kept the drapes drawn and the whole place dark, at least downstairs.
Trained in theater and interior design at UCLA, Lardner also will do her own writing in the rear garage that was once Sinclair's studio. She hopes he left behind some of his creative muse there.
Lardner said that her grandfather, who was a Monrovia postal worker, used to talk to the world-famous author every day when he'd come and collect his mail.
"He was a fascinating man and my grandfather was always telling tales about him," she said.
Previous owners of the home did not appreciate its virtues. After the foundation suffered some damage in the 5.8 Sierra Madre Earthquake of June 28, 1991, the owner wanted to tear it down.
During the years Sinclair lived in the home, he crowned his career as a writer and social activist with his popular "Lanny Budd" series.
John Ahouse, literary curator of USC's Doheney Library special collections, said Sinclair's achievement in the "Lanny Budds" eludes ordinary terms of measurement: eleven volumes of approximately 600 pages each were writen between 1940 and 1954; a far-flung narrative of carefully researched political events covering 30 tense years, built around a here-there-and-everywhere hero, part Everyman, part Superman, who plunges into the world of diplomacy, often as a direct emissary of President FDR.
Ahouse said that when the "World's End" series was over, Sinclair organized his papers, wrote his autobiography, remarried (His wife of fifty years, who had been at his side throughout the California years, had died in 1960), and, in the time remaining, embarked on a series of speaking tours. The "Lanny Budds" had kept him out of the public eye for twenty years. He rarely answered the door of his fortress-like home.
He said that Sinclair then emerged into the public limelight again, delivering a standard address about social progress in his lifetime and his own contributions to it. College students who had read The Jungle in high school and probably had no clue about the 1934 campaign in which its author was nearly was elected California's governor, cheered him wildly nonetheless, aware that they were in the presence of an American legend who somehow belonged specifically to California as well.
The students knew that the only reason they ate meat that is federally inspected was because of Sinclair's novel The Jungle, which was published in 1906. It shamed the nation into cleaning up the meat industry -- admittedly, a job that never ends -- and got Teddy Roosevelt to create the legislation to do that.
He wrote The Jungle in part to promote the cause of vegetarianism, as well as to promote socialism. He and another great politically inspired writer, a California bohemian named Jack London, are said to have created the huge generation of radicals that developed in this country from the turn of the century to the Great Depression.
Unlike London, Sinclair ended up being much more of a reformer than a revolutionary. The irony of Sinclair's life was that he found ways to "improve" capitalism rather than eliminate it.
In his Nobel-Prize address in 1930, Sinclair Lewis chastised the prize givers for not having also honored his mentor Upton Sinclair, "of whom you must say, whether you admire or detest his aggressive socialism, that he is internationally better known than any other American artist whosoever, be he novelist, poet, painter, sculptor, musician, architect." Lewis' Elmer Gantry, which has become the metaphor of crooked preachers, was inspired by Upton Sinclair's "Profits of Religion."
Lewis was not the only person who wanted Sinclair to have the Nobel Prize. His friend Albert Einstein, who played the violin with him, and Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw, among others, signed petitions to the Nobel committees.
Sinclair intrigued an incredibly wide variety of the famous. Such people as John Kennedy, Bertolt Brecht, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Leon Trotsky, Sergie Eisenstein, Herbert Marcuse, Ramsey Clark, Robert McNamara, Eric Sevareid, Patrick Moynihan, Norman Mailer, Maxim Gorky and Mahatma Gandhi claimed to have been deeply affected by his writings.
Although Sinclair's writing could be quite prosaic, he also could produce very beautiful and powerful writing. Some of his best writing is to be found in Oil, which gives as good a description of Southern California in the halcyon Œ20s as you're likely to find anywhere.
In Europe, Sinclair is still one of the most popular American writers there ever was. German television once did an in-depth documentary, which was shot in Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley. There's also been several books written about him.
Sinclair first settled in Pasadena in 1916, a decade after The Jungle had made him a national celebrity.
After The Jungle, Sinclair couldn't do anything without it showing up in the penny-dreadful New York "yellow press." By 1908 he was close to a nervous breakdown. His breakup with his first wife, Meta, had become lurid headlines everywhere he went. At the same time, George Sterling, who seems to have been a friend of every important California writer of the day - from Jack London to Robinson Jeffers - was trying to get Sinclair to come west. So was another socialist, millionaire H. Gaylord Wilshire, after whom Los Angeles' Wilshire Boulevard was named. Wilshire had a gold mine in the Sierra, whose two unusual main features were plenty of "high wages and socialist propaganda." Sinclair finally came west and stayed in the Sierra and in Carmel.
He was welcome by no less a personage than his noted fellow muckraker and author, Lincoln Steffens, who wrote him in Carmel, "You are in my state, you know - California, the most beautiful lady in the union - and you are in a beautiful place in that beautiful state." At that time, Steffens wanted Sinclair to come to Sacramento, and visit the Steffens household there. Sinclair didn't go to Sacramento that time but, ironically, in 1934 when Sinclair ran for and almost won the governorship, he did visit the Steffens home - for the Steffens home in Sacramento became the old Victorian governor's mansion that Ronald Reagan found not grandiose enough to fit his ambitions.
Those who grew up in the Golden State during the great Depression no doubt remember Sinclair and his "End Poverty in California" movement, the EPIC plan. It won him the Democratic nomination, and he lost to the Republicans with forty-five percent of the vote only after one of the most vicious political smear campaigns ever launched. Nonetheless, Sinclair's candidacy forced a realignment of the two major political parties, and out of the EPIC movement came such later Democratic officeholders as U.S. Sen. Sheridan Downey, Gov. Culbert Olson, Congressman Jerry Voorhis and Los Angeles County Supervisor John Anson Ford.
During his run for California governor, Sinclair was portrayed as some sort of hedonistic, devilish creature when in truth he was very much a Puritan. If anything, some of his radical friends found Sinclair just too much of a saint, a fanatic on "clean living." It was also obvious to a lot of people that Sinclair directed his sexual energies into his work, for there had to be some explanation for the incredible amounts of work he accomplished.
One can see his puritanical sensibilities in his shocked description in The Brass Check, of a certain "gorgeous and expensive leisure-class hotel" in Pasadena. (Hint: It's now a federal court building). Sinclair wrote with obvious horror about "the elderly ladies of fashion who were putting paint on their cheeks, and cutting their dresses halfway down their backs, and making open efforts to seduce" the young men on the premises. He complained that young matrons "disappeared for trips into the mountain canyons nearby" with members of the opposite sex. Then there was "the married lady of great wealth who had been in several scandals, who caroused all night with half a dozen soldiers and sailors, supplying them all with all the liquor they wanted in spite of the law, and who finally was asked to leave the hotel -- not because of this carousing but because she failed to pay the liquor bill."
It might be odd that Sinclair settled into that most unsocialist of all places. He described Pasadena as "the city of millionaires" and he was certainly right. The nation's "plutocracy," to use Sinclair's word, had been spending their time in Pasadena for some while. Even the millionaires didn't have air conditioning in those days. So they would leave the muggy, hot East, and spend their time in the mansions and great hotels of Pasadena. One of their favorite activities was playing tennis. As a matter of fact, one of Sinclair's favorite activities was playing tennis. He once ranked as Pasadena's seventh best tennis player.
It certainly was not out of character for Sinclair to love what was then that most plutocratic of sports. For the nation's most notorious socialist was in fact very much a genteel aristocrat. His father had been a drunk, but, like Sinclair's mother, he was proud of his family being old Confederate Navy aristocracy. Furthermore, through his mother's family, Sinclair was related to the Blands, one of the wealthiest families in Baltimore.
Sinclair's life was an odd variation on the Horatio Alger theme: he had risen out of the slums to make himself a great success through his writing, but he had never aspired to riches, as did most other successful Americans who lifted themselves from poverty and slums by their own bootstraps. Instead, he wanted an explanation for the chasm he saw between the rich and poor. Social justice, not wealth, was his obsession.
Significantly, Sinclair discovered socialism in Wilshire's Magazine, which was published by H. Gaylord Wilshire. He first saw the magazine in 1902 in a New York editor's office. He used to prowl editorial offices for work because he had discovered early on that he had a knack for writing pulp magazine fiction, and while he was still a teenager, he supported himself and his parents with his hack work.
One of the great moments in his life was when he finally got to meet Wilshire. Wilshire had made and lost fortunes in L.A. real estate, but whenever he made money he always plowed it into his socialist ventures, be they magazines or mines. He had been sure that the boulevard to which he had given his name would become the "fashionable concourse and driveway" of L.A. He was right, - Wilshire Boulevard was destined to become L.A.'s answer to the Champs Elysee of Paris, Fifth Avenue in New York and Michigan Avenue in Chicago.
In certain ways, he fit right in with some of his millionaire neighbors in Pasadena, especially the American counterpart of the Fabian socialists in England of that time. Two Fabian authors, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, regularly communicated by letter with Sinclair. And Wilshire, who was Sinclair's neighbor, traveled to England constantly.
Others in Pasadena society with whom Sinclair ran included Charles Chaplin, the "plant wizard" Luther Burbank, Mrs. Kate Crane-Gartz of the Crane plumbing fortune, Bobby Scripps of the newspaper chain, and land and oil heiress Aline Barnsdall.
Sinclair owned several cottages in the 1500 block of Sunset Avenue (long since torn down for a freeway). He used to go walking with Henry Ford in the San Gabriel Mountains behind Pasadena; they would discuss politics and economics. Finally Sinclair realized that he wasn't getting anywhere with Ford. He reasoned that perhaps another millionaire, a socialist, could better convince Ford. So he asked King Gillette, the socialist razor king, to argue with the capitalist fliver king. Gillette was no more successful than Sinclair had been.
Of all his friends, aside from Chaplin, Wilshire was the closest. When Wilshire's gold mine was doing badly, Sinclair gave him most of what he had left from the fortune he made with The Jungle. He also encouraged other socialists to do so -- but the gold mine went under anyway.
Sinclair had a particular enemy in Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times.
When Sinclair lectured a group of ladies in Pasadena, Otis himself described the speech as "more-or-less brilliant quotations upholding anarchy, destruction, lawlessness, revolution, from the lips of an effeminate young man with a fatuous smile, a weak chin and a sloping forehead, talking in a false treble, and accusing them of leading selfish, self-indulgent lives." The Times story reported that Sinclair had expressed his sympathy with dynamiters and murderers, and it added that "never before an audience of red-blooded men could Upton Sinclair have voiced his weak, pernicious, vicious doctrines. His native, fatuous smile alone would have aroused their ire before he opened his vainglorious mouth. Let the fact remain that this slim, beflanneled example of perverted masculinity could and did get several hundred women to listen to him."
At the same time Sinclair was in San Pedro, getting jailed for his participation in a "Wobbly" strike at a place called Liberty Hill. He was arrested while speaking to seven hundred strikers. He stood on private property, and he had written permission from the owner to be there. He was reading the Declaration of Independence and the First Amendment to the Constitution. He was held incommunicado overnight -- and out of the incident came the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. Of all the things Sinclair accomplished in his life, he listed the founding of the Southern California branch of the ACLU as one of the very most important things he had ever done.
The Brass Check received accolades from all over the world. The notorious cynic and wit H.L Mencken wrote of the book to its author: "I find nothing that seems to me to be exaggerated. On the contrary, you have, in many ways, much understated your case." But Mencken did not go along with Sinclair's suggestion that socialism was the answer. "To hell with socialism," he said. "The longer I live, the more I am convinced that the common people are doomed to be diddled forever. You are fighting a vain fight. But you must be having lots of fun."
Mencken and Sinclair carried on an exchange of their views over the years, and Mencken even came and visited Sinclair in Pasadena. They argued about booze and Jack London. Mencken was, of course, firmly committed to booze. Sinclair was a prohibitionist -- it's been suggested more than once that the sight of his drunken father had made him that way.
Sinclair also carried on lengthy correspondence during his early days in Pasadena with an English writer named Winston Churchchill. And there was always considerable correspondence between Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis. When Lewis came and visited Sinclair in Pasadena, the younger man went way out of his way to be sober -- which was not necessarily his most natural state.
Eugene Debs and Clarence Darrow, the famed socialist and the crusading lawyer, respectively, were visitors in Pasadena. Later, of course, Albert Einstein, during the years he spent at nearby California Institute of Technology, spent many hours with Sinclair. Both were amateur violinists -- and the emphasis is on the word amateur.
There was correspondence from the great playwright Eugene O'Neill, who told Sinclair how much he had been affected by The Jungle and how he was thinking of moving to California soon. Thomas Mann and Sinclair had been correspondents even before Mann fled Germany to end up in exile on Los Angeles shores.
The Sinclairs lived in the San Gabriel Valley for about half a century, and left to live in other Southern California on rare occasions -- once in Long Beach, where he wrote Oil, and in Beverly Hills.
When he settled into his Monrovia house, Sinclair was no longer the center of great social movements that he, in part, had created.
Instead he created Lanny Buddy series, one of which won him his one Pulitizer Prize. His gregarious life was over. He wasn't meeting a lot of people -- he was writing Lanny Budd.
"He cacooned himself with his enormous project. He researched the novels down to the tiniest detail-- by mail -- and with the help of the local librarian," Ahouse, who is also the foremost Sinclair bibliographer, said.
Ahouse said the local librarian was Kate Ainsworth, the wife of Ed Ainsworth of the Times. The irony is that Ainsworth and the paper's political writer Kyle Palmer, were the ones assigned to do dirt on Sinclair during the EPIC campaign in the '30s, and the paper's owners ordered the two men to pile it on.
The two older men in Monrovia buried the hatchet.
Mary Craig Sinclair, meanwhile, was become an invalid because of heart troubles -- and during the '50s the pair left Monrovia to see if her heatlh would be in better in Buckeye, Arizona, where they owned a small house.
The Sinclairs had also become friends with Richard Armour, a humorist in the vein of Odgden Nash who was also a Chaucer scholar and Dean of the Faculty at one of the Claremont Colleges. Through Armour, Upton met Fred Hard, president of Scripps.
It was Hard's widowed sister May Willis who became the third Mrs. Sinclair in San Bernardino on Oct. 14, 1961.
Ahouse noted that May, unlike the abstemious Mary Craig, "unlikie the late Queen Mother, needed her daily drop of whiskey, which meant that Upton, the lifelong teetotaler, had to slip out of the hosue and visit a liquore store incognito from time to time."
Finally in the mid -'60s, when Upton's health began to fail, the couple moved back east to be with his son. She died first, and he finally died in a New Jersey nursing home in 1968 at 90 years of age after having written nearly 100 books.
About the Monrovia house, Ahouse said he "never really moved out -- he just didn't return from that last trip to the East."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lionel Rolfe is the author of Literary L.A., which has just been reissued in an enlarged third edition. It includes two chapters on Sinclair. He also wrote Fat Man on the Left. 
Photo by Boyd Lewis
| 
