Dreamers and Deceivers (21 page)

There were other reasons, too—selfish ones: A baby’s incessant demands for love and attention, along with its ceaseless wailing, would interfere with his crusade for social justice. He needed to concentrate on the works of Marx and Engels and to pour himself into his writing. He had a calling—and it wasn’t fatherhood; it was to become a propagandist—a term he used proudly—for the cause of socialism, and to topple capitalism by educating Americans and persuading them to overthrow their government.

Sinclair was nothing if not a man with an outsize ego. Even though he had a series of literary flops that left him on the verge of bankruptcy, he was convinced that his gift for the written word made him the right man to lead the country into a new era of enlightenment and social equality.

But a child? That would ruin everything.

Leek Island

Ontario, Canada

August 4, 1901

Meta Sinclair flung herself from the bed, trying to slam her belly against the floor. She and Upton had debated whether to visit the local doctor, but an abortion would not only be illegal; it would also be dangerous. In the end, they decided to end the pregnancy themselves by attempting to induce a miscarriage.

Meta had foraged for herbal remedies, which she had ingested with food and drank as teas. She had exercised vigorously in the hope that the strain might prove too much for the child inside her. But nothing worked. This baby was determined to come into the world.

Whether his parents wanted him to or not.

Union Stock Yards

Packingtown, Chicago

October 8, 1904

A quiet rage seethed in Sinclair as he walked through the muddy streets around the stockyards. His gait was purposeful, his lips pursed as he took in the sights—and the stench—of his surroundings. He was glad to be away from the constant demands and distractions of his family. Meta was a gorgeous, sensual woman, but she had wild mood swings and fierce bouts of depression and rage. And, of course, he had no concern about not being around the son he never wanted.

At the age of twenty-six, Upton Sinclair was excitable and prone to working himself up into a righteous fury that would paralyze him with nervous tension, indigestion, and migraines. But today his mind was clear. He was armed with his lunch pail and his powers of observation. None of his previous writing projects had achieved the success he sought, but he had every confidence that this one would be different. In fact,
Appeal to Reason,
the nation’s leading socialist weekly newspaper, had already agreed to serialize his reporting from Packingtown, home of the Union Stock Yards.

Built over a swamp in South Chicago, the Yards could accommodate more than 75,000 hogs, 21,000 cattle, and 22,000 sheep at any one time, making it the meatpacking center of the world, the Capital of Slaughter. The railroads brought ten million animals to the Yards each year to be slaughtered, their parts processed and shipped to consumers from San Francisco to New York, to London and beyond.

But it wasn’t a sense of empathy for the animals that filled the young writer with anger. He seethed because the men and women who worked there were pawns of capitalists and business tycoons who profited handsomely from the bloody, dangerous work their underlings performed each day. This was slavery for a new generation.

He knew how that sounded. Yes, he supposed, it was true that these workers hadn’t been pulled from their homes by force. They had, in fact, flocked here by the thousands from eastern and southern Europe in search of jobs. Sinclair also knew that these workers wouldn’t be beaten or killed if they tried to leave. Still, he reasoned, they were slaves
nonetheless. Slaves to their own desperation. Slaves to a system that rewards the wealthy few at the expense of the desperate, starving many. These men were barely paid. They were stripped of their dignity, void of their very humanity.

“Wage slavery” is what Sinclair called this new kind of bondage propagated by greedy capitalists. And he was resolved to end it by writing a book that would expose the scheme and provoke enough outrage to inspire a new revolution. He intended for his book to do for organized labor and the socialist movement what Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
had done for the cause of abolition before the Civil War.

It would be called
The Jungle.

Packingtown, Chicago

October 14, 1904

The metallic smell of blood invaded Sinclair’s nostrils. He walked down the center aisle of the hog room past hundreds of hanging carcasses. This was where the whole hogs were hung and split down the backbone with a two-foot blade. Even at this stage, after the fatal hammer blow to the head, slit throat, and severed major arteries and veins, even after the entrails were removed and the carcass was hung on hooks, there was blood. It caked the floor and spattered the walls.

This was industrial-age killing, an assembly line of meat production. Or, as Sinclair liked to think of it, a “disassembly line.” The process of slaughtering an animal and packing up its meat involved eighty separate jobs. There were the knockers, the leg breakers, the rippers, and the gutters. Hooks moved the animals through the factory to the smokers, the salters, the picklers, the canners. And those were just the workers who dealt with the meat. There were also workers who turned the organs, the bones, and the fat into lard, soap, and fertilizer.

A satisfied smile crossed Sinclair’s lips. He had managed to convince the plant foreman that he was a Polish immigrant needing a job inside the Armour meatpacking factory. He marveled at his own gift for duplicity and the ease with which he could fool others. Of course, he
didn’t dare bring his reporter’s notepad with him. Instead he memorized everything he saw and then rushed back to his room across the railroad tracks to write it all down.

This is how he would make his mark. His father had gone in and out of this world without making any impact—other than depriving it of a few barrels of whiskey.

But not him.

The Jungle,
he knew, would make him a legend.

The White House

Washington, D.C.

April 4, 1906

The hulking man pulled the spectacles off his nose. A less imposing figure might have looked small behind the massive desk in the Oval Office, but not the barrel-chested Theodore Roosevelt. Five years earlier, at just forty-seven years old, he had become the youngest president ever to assume office. Roosevelt carried himself with the youthful vigor of a man many years younger. A writer of considerable talent, he fancied himself a man of letters, which was one of the reasons why he had invited Upton Sinclair to the White House.

Teddy Roosevelt prided himself on his ability to accurately size people up. As he looked at the young man who entered his office, he sensed that the fellow was a bit of an upstart, brimming with a little too much self-confidence. But the president also got the feeling that the man’s heart was in the right place.

Roosevelt had made something of a career out of assailing monopolies, often to the detriment of customers and workers. He also liked to see his name in the newspapers. When he was governor of New York, he often held press conferences twice a day, making sure reporters would have ample opportunity to learn of his successes and giving himself a chance to rail unchallenged against those he deemed corrupt.

For these and other reasons, the president was receptive to Sinclair’s book,
The Jungle
. Assuming office after the assassination of President William McKinley, Roosevelt was a forceful presence on the national
stage. He was eager to use his power to bring America’s enemies to heel, whether they be recalcitrant heads of state or capitalists at home who needed to have their heads knocked together.

Roosevelt agreed with Sinclair’s conclusion that avaricious capitalist meatpackers were colluding to form a monopoly and take advantage of the working class. He reasoned that these arrogant, wealthy industrialists needed to be put back in their place, just as he, the trust-busting president, had done with the railroad barons and with John Rockefeller and his Standard Oil monopoly. Roosevelt was also not an idiot when it came to politics: He saw the wisdom of supporting a book that had quickly won national acclaim and press attention.

Over the past year, Roosevelt and Sinclair, two self-described crusaders for justice, had exchanged long letters, the last of which had ended with an invitation from the president. “If you can come down here during the first week in April,” Roosevelt wrote, “I shall be particularly glad to see you.”

•  •  •

The majesty of the president’s office, the living, beating heart of the American capitalist system, impressed even a skeptic like Sinclair. The office had been refurbished only a few years earlier as part of the effort to build a suite of executive offices for Roosevelt and his staff. It would eventually become known as the West Wing.

As the president rose and extended a hand to Sinclair, the author noted that a dog-eared copy of
The Jungle
was conspicuously displayed on Roosevelt’s desk. Sinclair knew that Roosevelt was a speed-reader with a reputation for consuming books with enthusiasm and vigor. He was said to read a book before breakfast and as many as two or three more by dinnertime. Once asked by a friend to recommend a book, Roosevelt had suggested a hundred, all of which he’d claimed to have read in the previous two years.

“Welcome to Washington, my boy,” the president said affably. He gestured to a chair, urged Sinclair to sit, and took a seat across from him.

An aide opened the door to the office. “Some cookies and tea, sir?” he asked.

“None for me,” Roosevelt responded, patting his stomach. “I’m
trying to get back into shape for tennis season now that the weather is turning bearable again. But Mr. Sinclair here will have some.”

Roosevelt had mastered the politician’s skill of studied sincerity. He also had a habit of getting right to the point. “I want to thank you for bringing these problems in Chicago’s stockyards to my attention—”

“
America’s
attention, Mr. President,” Sinclair interrupted.

Roosevelt nodded vigorously. “That’s right. America’s attention. We’re going to be sending a team of investigators—the best of the best—to take a look into the allegations—”

“They’re not allegations,” Sinclair interrupted again. If the president thought he was going to dominate a conversation with someone of Sinclair’s intelligence and stature, he was very wrong.

Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t used to being interrupted. The atmosphere in the room quickly chilled.

“But, Mr. Sinclair, by your own admission, you have written a novel. And surely, like all novelists, you have taken some creative license.”

“No, everything I wrote in
The Jungle
is the truth. It’s the truth about what goes on in those infernal factories, and what happens to the people who spend their lives working in them. My book is an exact and faithful picture of the conditions that exist in Packingtown, Chicago, down to the smallest details. It is as true as a study written by a sociologist.”

Sinclair’s cheeks reddened. He was working himself into a lather again.

“Then, why, dear sir, is your publisher billing
The Jungle
as a novel?” the president asked.

Sinclair struggled to maintain his composure. In his mind, both his reporting and his very integrity were being questioned.

He stammered indignantly, “Why, why, yes of course I’ve taken some liberties here and there to dramatize and interpret what I saw. That’s necessary to hold people’s attention.”

Roosevelt nodded with satisfaction. “So then you understand why I must send our investigators to validate what you’ve written—”

“If you send those investigators it will be like sending burglars to the crime scene to deliver a verdict on their own guilt!”

By the time the meeting ended, neither man was very impressed with
the other. Sinclair now viewed the president as an appalling clown and dupe.
Even the unabashed trust-busting progressive Teddy Roosevelt is a pawn of the industrialists, his entire government well fed with bribes,
he thought.

Roosevelt was equally unenamored with Sinclair. Writing to a friend, the president noted, “I have an utter contempt for him. He is hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful. Three-fourths of the things he said were absolute falsehoods. For some of the remainder there was only a basis of truth.”

13 Years Later

R Street NW

Washington D.C.

June 2, 1919

11:13
P.M.

Carlo Valdinoci walked down the quiet cobblestone streets of Georgetown. Wearing a new fedora purchased at Philadelphia’s Italian Market, he was dressed to the nines. He strode confidently in his new black suit, a colorful checkered dress shirt, and a bright blue polka-dotted tie.

He ambled a bit awkwardly, however, due to the Smith & Wesson revolver and Colt automatic concealed in his clothes and the heavy leather satchel jammed with twenty pounds of dynamite he had slung over his shoulder.

Despite his awkward gait, Valdinoci soon reached his destination: the home of Attorney General of the United States A. Mitchell Palmer, a southerner who had been appointed earlier that year by President Woodrow Wilson. Valdinoci gingerly mounted the front steps, planning to leave his deadly package by the front door. Its blasting cap was set to detonate a few minutes after he made his escape.

Everything was going smoothly until he reached the top step. Only then did the weight of the mini-arsenal he carried begin to swing to one side. Valdinoci swung his weight the other way to compensate, but he overdid it. He began to wobble, and then lost his balance completely.

He tripped. He fell. And then he exploded.

In a blinding flash of light, the would-be assassin instantly burst into thousands of pieces of bone and flesh. Pages of anarchist literature fluttered in the grass.

The concussive force of the blast shattered nearby windows, including those of the house across the street, where Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt lived. Five doors down, part of Valdinoci’s spinal column crashed through a window and landed in the bed of a sleeping fourteen-year old.