Dreamers and Deceivers (23 page)

Now, with the sound of a nation’s applause ringing in his ears, Upton Sinclair slept like a baby.

39 Years Later

Bound Brook, New Jersey

November 26, 1968

Upton Sinclair—labeled by the
New York Times
as a “crusader for social justice”—died in his sleep at ninety-years-old. The obituary in that morning’s paper quoted no better expert on Sinclair than Sinclair himself, who once offered what the
Times
called “a moment of proud self-assessment toward the close of his life”:

The English Queen Mary, who failed to hold the French port of Calais, said that when she died the word “Calais” would be found written on her heart. I don’t know whether anyone will care to examine my heart, but if they do they will find two words there—“Social Justice.” For that is what I have believed in and fought for.

The
Times
noted Sinclair’s most famous works, such as
The Jungle,
and made a special note of
Boston,
which they called “one of the best of his social novels, which told the story of the Sacco-Vanzetti case.”

But not, as it turns out, the
whole
story.

EPILOGUE

27 Years Later

Irvine, California

December 2005

Strolling past boxed documents at an auction house, one of them in particular—Lot 217—caught Paul Hegness’s eye.

Hegness, a collector of rare books and first editions, found in that auction lot a letter addressed to a man named John Beardsley. It was signed by the great author Upton Sinclair.

As Hegness read through the letter, the last paragraph caught his attention. “This letter is for yourself alone,” Sinclair wrote. “Stick it away in your safe, and some time in the far distant future the world may
know the real truth about the matter. I am here trying to make plain my own part in the story.”

Hegness turned back to the beginning of the letter and read with rapt attention as Sinclair revealed the details of his fateful meeting in Denver with Fred Moore.

When Moore had asked Sinclair to reveal what he already knew about the famous case, Sinclair thought he might get better answers from Moore if he pretended to have already learned of Sacco and Vanzetti’s guilt.

“Look, these two men are guilty as sin,” Sinclair had said. “You and I know both know they were guilty of the holdup and they killed those two men at the shoe factory.”

If Sinclair’s assertion offended the defense attorney, Moore didn’t show it. “Since you have got the whole story,” Moore said simply, “there is no use in my holding anything back.” Moore wasn’t going to lie to a respected man like Upton Sinclair. Maybe, he hoped, the world-renowned truth teller would keep silent in the interests of their shared political beliefs.

For hours that night, Moore spilled every detail of the case. He told Sinclair how he had ginned up a set of alibis for both Sacco and Vanzetti. He disclosed that they were in an active terrorist cell that had been buying dynamite and working to attack politicians and Wall Street bankers. And he revealed that the pair had previously performed a number of other payroll holdups in order to fund the acquisition of dynamite and weapons.

On his train ride to California, Sinclair had pondered his predicament. He had already announced to the world that he was going to write a book setting the record straight about Sacco and Vanzetti. Parts of it had, in fact, already been published in a leading literary journal. Fans assumed that the book would exonerate the martyred anarchists. But, after learning of their guilt from Fred Moore, Sinclair was faced with three options, none of them good.

First, he could rewrite the book, revealing Sacco and Vanzetti’s guilt. That story would have the benefit of being true, but it could have horrible repercussions. It would set back the cause of socialism and,
perhaps even worse, it would alienate Sinclair from his fans. They would stop buying his books. They would reject him and ridicule him as a sellout to the capitalists.

Second, he could drop the entire project. It was a better option than the first. The problem was that he was on the record as having praised both Sacco and Vanzetti. Thousands of words had already been printed. He had been convinced that the men were pacifists, not violent radicals who believed in “direct action”—the euphemism of the day for terrorism. Any decision to abandon the book now would telegraph to his fans that he had changed his mind and had concluded Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. And then he’d be no better off than if he had simply written the truth.

The third option offered the path of least resistance: write the book he had always intended to write, and disregard what he had learned from Fred Moore as the ramblings of a delusional, scorned defense attorney who had lost the case of the century for his clients. Sacco and Vanzetti would still be the victims of class warfare. The capitalists who had rushed to judgment and denied them a fair trial would still be the real criminals. The book would still become a bestseller. Sinclair would still make money and win all the accolades and applause he coveted. And the cause of socialism would still be one step closer to winning the war for the hearts and minds of the American people.

In the end, Sinclair treated the truth the same way he had treated his son—as a valueless distraction from the cause of socialism and his ever-growing ambition. By the time he died, the Sinclair who had spent a sleepless night on that train was long gone. All that remained was the confession Paul Hegness had accidentally stumbled upon in an old box of letters.

Why did Sinclair write the letter? It’s unclear—but one thing is certain: The day he wrote it was the only time in his life when he was willing to admit that
Boston,
one of his great works, was a lie.

Note:
The entire text of Sinclair’s extraordinary letter to John Beardsley can be found in the appendix at the end of this book.

50 Miles off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina

March 29, 1942

12
P.M.

The SS
City of New York
cut through the waves as it barreled northward toward the port that bore its name. Over the last week the ship’s officers had received radio reports filled with SOS signals from merchant vessels being sunk up and down the Atlantic Coast by Nazi U-boats. Most of the passengers had heard rumors about the onslaught, but they had no idea that these were not really rumors at all.

Those oblivious to the imminent danger included the ship’s doctor, Leonard Conly. The voyage to East Africa and back was his first journey at sea. Even now, after four months of sailing, life hadn’t improved much. He spent a good part of each day retching in his cabin as the swells pummeled the ship’s sides. Today seemed particularly rough. As he kneeled by the toilet, he closed his eyes and thought of his wife and one-year-old son back in Brooklyn. He would see them both again in just a few days.

He heard the ship’s bell summoning the passengers for lunch, and
the thought of food made him retch again. It was Palm Sunday, the day of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem. But for Leonard Conly and the 144 souls aboard the ship, the day did not bring salvation.

•  •  •

The SS
City of New York
descended into its watery grave faster than anyone anticipated. Just as the passengers were sitting down to lunch, a crew member saw a periscope protruding above the water, followed by the unmistakable wake of a torpedo.

Everyone on board felt the explosion that followed.

It all happened so fast. The crew quickly evacuated the passengers to lifeboats. Dr. Conly stayed close to a blond, blue-eyed pregnant woman and helped her aboard. Now, hours later, they were at the mercy of the sea, drifting north in lifeboats in the waters of the Gulf Stream. The brutal cold had already taken the life of one of the survivors, his body cast off to sea.

But Leonard Conly had more immediate problems: Desanka Mohorovicic, the pregnant woman he’d escorted to safety, was about to give birth aboard a violently pitching lifeboat in fifteen-foot swells with a dozen shivering fellow survivors inches away.

The night was jet black and Conly could hardly see a thing. His two cracked ribs—broken when he slipped while jumping into the lifeboat—didn’t help matters, either. He might as well have been delivering the baby on board a roller coaster back on Coney Island.

Mohorovicic screamed in pain. This was the moment. Conly winced as he reached out to her and took a healthy, eight-pound baby boy into his hands.

March 30, 1942

4:30
A.M.

The destroyer USS
Jesse Roper
plied the inky black waters of the Atlantic Ocean looking for any more survivors from the sinking of the
City of New York
. The captain knew that the odds were long.

In the first six months of 1942, five thousand people, many of them
Americans, were killed and 397 ships were sunk or damaged by German U-boats in the waters off American shores. That list included the
Jesse Roper
’s sister ship, the USS
Jacob Jones
. Almost all the sailors on board had perished.

The
Jesse Roper
had found a few lifeboats scattered like buoys across the Nazi-infested Atlantic, their beacons signaling SOS in bright white lights. As the destroyer pulled alongside another, the crew saw a woman inside cradling a newborn baby.

The child was named Jesse Roper after the ship that saved him. The press soon dubbed him “the baby Hitler couldn’t get.” As news of the rescue spread across America, spirits and morale rose.

While the country did not yet know it, the rescue of Baby Jesse was not the only reason to celebrate: The British were taking on the fearsome U-boats—and winning.

And leading the charge was a most unlikely chap.

St. Leonards-on-Sea, England

April 9, 1919

The six-year-old boy’s hay fever was the worst at this time of year.

St. Leonards-on-Sea, a small, quiet town on the southeast coast of England, was a safe place. Safe enough for a boy to stroll down the street alone without his parents worrying about him. Not that Alan Turing’s parents even knew what he was up to; they were thousands of miles away in Madras, India, where Mr. Turing served in the Indian Civil Service. Alan’s parents were members of the British upper class who embraced the “white man’s burden” of empire building, leaving mundane matters, like the raising of children, to servants back home in England.

Alan’s allergies didn’t keep him from his daily stroll. There was not much that could deter this stubborn boy when he set his mind on something, and he loved to wander around by himself and daydream.

Today’s perambulation was typical in many ways. For starters, Alan was, as usual, a mess. His sailor’s outfit, standard attire for young boys
at the time, was stained with fruit juice and his shirttail was untucked. His sailor’s cap sat askew atop his disheveled dark hair.

Carefree as he rambled between neighborhood gardens and houses, young Alan became entranced by the bees buzzing around him.
Where,
he wondered,
is the nest for all the bees that are out today?
He began observing, plotting the intersection of their flight paths in his mind, and following the likely path. He found the hive minutes later. Nothing was more fun for him than solving problems.

As he turned back toward home, Alan stopped to read the serial numbers stamped into the iron lampposts. He didn’t realize it yet—at least not consciously—but what attracted him most to numbers was that they always obeyed their own rules. They had a code, and they were true to it. That was the kind of world that the precocious boy wanted to live in.

North Wales

December 25, 1924

Alan couldn’t sleep. It was well past midnight, and he would celebrate Christmas morning with his older brother and parents, who were visiting from India, in just a few hours. The twelve-year old couldn’t wait to run downstairs to the parlor of his family’s vacation home. If his wish came true, the crucibles and test tubes of a chemistry set would be waiting for him under the tree.

In the meantime, he sat in bed reading E. T. Brewster’s
Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know
by candlelight. Its first chapter was titled “How the Chicken Got Inside the Egg” and, from cover to cover, the book made science approachable and exciting by defining life as the product of scientific processes.

Brewster’s book taught that the body was a machine made of living bricks. Alan’s favorite section was about poisons. “The life of any creature—man, animal, or plant—is one long fight against being poisoned,” Brewster wrote. With his homemade fountain pen, Alan had underlined “one long fight against being poisoned.” It was heady, somewhat morbid, and occasionally inaccurate reading material, but he
stayed up all night revisiting his favorite passages and wondering about their implications for life in general—and his life in particular.

In this way, Alan was a most unusual boy. But when Christmas morning finally arrived, there was nothing unique about the joy in his bright blue eyes when his parents let him open his gift.

It was a chemistry set.

10 Years Later

German Countryside

June 7, 1934

A madman had taken over Germany, but like his many of his countrymen, Alan Turing was too apolitical and naïve to realize it. Therefore, it was far from extraordinary that upon his graduation from Cambridge with a degree in mathematics, he chose to go on a cycling holiday in Germany. It was a chance to celebrate his selection as one of the youngest dons in Cambridge’s modern history and to get away from his little corner of the world—a corner defined mostly by mind-bogglingly complex mathematical inquiries.

Alan’s cycling trip through Germany should have taken his mind off work, but even on vacation he couldn’t escape the pull of mathematics. In fact, a few days of isolation made him realize that he didn’t actually
want
to escape.