A September labor remembrance: Upton Sinclair

The author of “The Jungle,” the 1906 landmark novel about brutal, unsanitary working conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking plants, was Upton Sinclair, born 148 years ago this month.

A devoted labor supporter and activist and a muckraking journalist and novelist, Sinclair frequently organized protests, like a demonstration at John D. Rockefeller’s New York City headquarters nine days after the “Ludlow Massacre” at Rockefeller’s Colorado mines. He wrote “King Coal” in 1917 and 20 years later penned “The Flivver King,” a critique of the auto industry.

Among almost 100 books he wrote was “The Brass Check,” a 1919 expose of the corporate press and how it ignored or slanted labor coverage. In 1923, he joined a San Pedro, Calif., strike by the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”) and was arrested when he tried to read the First Amendment to striking port workers. Soon after he helped start the California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Sinclair also ran for California governor three times, losing big in his first two efforts running as a Socialist, but got 879,000 ballots running an “End Poverty in California” campaign as a Democrat.

In 1943 he won the Pulitzer Prize for the third of 11 “Lanny Budd” novels, “Dragon’s Teeth.”

 

Pictured: Sinclair (right) getting arrested outside John D. Rockefeller's New York headquarters after the Ludlow Massacre, where striking workers were killed at one of Rockefeller's coal mines.