And the luncheon itself, which Upton had awaited with boyish eagerness, proved to be one of the ordeals of his adult life.
Promptly at twelve o’clock the luncheon party was seated, at a long table at which President Roosevelt sat at the head, and his chief aide at the foot; they were served by mute-seeming Negro waiters in impeccable white uniforms, that emphasized the dramatic darkness of their skins; the men ate, with the exception of Upton Sinclair, with appalling gusto, as if they had not eaten in days; and Teddy ate, and talked—talked.
“The Old Guard senators be damned,” the President declared, striking the table with a clenched fist, so that cutlery rattled against china, “I know what I know, and my stomach isn’t deceived. It was tainted, and overripe, and damn-right maggoty meat we were given in the very act of serving our nation in Cuba! Treason! That crook Armour should have been hanged!—the packers should have been hanged! Routed, and tarred and feathered, and set ablaze, and hanged for
treason in wartime
. And now this courageous young man Mr. Sinclair exposes the fact that Armour & Company profit by shoveling rat dung, and cow fetuses, and cow tails, and eyeballs, and every variety of gristle, innards, and excrement, and, by God, fingers and toes of human beings, into such staples of the American household as deviled ham—a favorite of my boyhood!—spicing it up, as it were, with the expectorations of hunkie T.B. carriers! This treason will not be countenanced as long as Teddy Roosevelt sits in the White House.”
So many grimaces accompanied this speech, and so many blows on the table, Upton Sinclair had to steel himself not to wince, staring in amazement at his fiery host. How very like Jack London the President was, and Mother Jones: the impolite yet admiring word had to be
rabble-rouser,
a talent surely bred in the womb. Teddy’s voice so brayed, Upton felt a need to press his fingers into his ears, seated beside the man, yet did not make a move of course. It was stunning to him, whose demeanor even in Socialist circles was reticent and restrained, and whose manner was always to defer to someone who interrupted him, to observe a man for whom speech was indeed a kind of sustained expectoration; to see that the outsized “Teddy” of the tabloids and popular imagination was an actual person, of the species of caricature. (Yet no caricaturist could do justice to the living man, Upton saw.) It seemed that the President was accustomed to entertaining his listeners and himself with a performance of serio-comic genius: gruff, blustery, big-toothed, excessive and exaggerated, with a high squeaking voice issuing from the fleshy face; indistinguishable, except for the content of his words, from imitations of “Teddy” by vaudeville and burlesque comedians.
When the President at last paused in his ranting, to lower his head to his plate and eat, all that he’d said was heartily if somewhat perfunctorily seconded by his vice president Mr. Charles Fairbanks, his Republican-party comrade Mr. James Garfield, his aide Mr. Francis Leupp, and others, who gave every evidence of having listened closely to the outburst, as if they had never heard it before. The genial Mr. Fairbanks was so thoughtful, or possessed of so sly a sense of humor, as to observe to Upton Sinclair that all pleasure in the day’s meal was considerably qualified by the “gross, shameful, nauseating” revelations in
The Jungle;
though, as the vegetarian Upton wryly noted, the gentlemen were devouring their roast beef rare with unslackened appetite.
Why
does humankind insist upon eating animals?—is it in lieu of eating one another?
—so Upton thought, sipping water from a crystal goblet as, elsewhere around the table, the gentlemen were drinking a very pungent-smelling dark ale.
In an interrogative way, that made Upton Sinclair quite uncomfortable, the President asked why he’d investigated the Chicago stockyards in the first place, and “why in hell” had he suffered the hardship of spending seven weeks in the Stockyards Hotel; but when Upton tried to explain that it was his sympathy for the workingman, particularly those of foreign birth, and his more general interest in the Socialist brotherhood of man, and in the vegetarian movement, rather than a narrow interest in the sanitary conditions of the packing houses, it seemed that the President’s eyes acquired a distant look behind the round glinting lenses of his glasses; and a moment later, in an outburst that might have been considered rude in other circumstances, the President interrupted his guest with a sudden guffaw, and a smart blow to the table, having at that instant recalled a meal he and his Rough Riders had been forced to consume on the “very eve” of the great Battle of San Juan Hill.
“Tainted, and overripe, and damn-right maggoty, I say!”—even as he scooped a dripping piece of roast beef into his mouth, and chewed.
This led to an entertaining reminiscence on the part of Roosevelt regarding his famed Rough Riders, which cavalry unit had participated in more skirmishes than the pacifist Upton Sinclair had known. The President seemed particularly proud of the fact that his unit had suffered a high degree of casualties—“Many more than the average, sir!”—and that they’d indeed had a “damn rough time of it” during the ten weeks’ fighting of the “splendid little war” against the Spanish villains. “It was that damned ‘embalmed beef’ that counted for most of our casualties,” the President said grimly, “and now that I sit in the damned White House, Armour & Crook Company had better take notice.”
During a welcome lull in the conversation while the gentlemen were sampling a new, even darker and more pungent ale, Upton broached the subject of the plight of the “common workingman and woman” in the country, which he saw as unconscionable, set beside the massive profits of their capitalist employers. Since the President and his aides had presumably read
The Jungle,
they were now well informed of conditions in Chicago, and would surely wish to propose some legislation to remedy them at once; yet it should be understood that working conditions in stockyards throughout the country were no better, or even worse; and the pay scale was frequently lower. And the cruelty to the animals—this, indeed, was not to be countenanced by decent persons . . . Upton grew increasingly impassioned until his voice trembled. “Only consider the wretched working conditions in factories owned by the copper trust, and the steel trust, and the tin trust, and all the rest. How can it be tolerated, Mr. President, that even as we dine in this elegant room, children as young as six and seven are toiling in factories close by us, particularly across the river in Maryland; and the inhuman owners insist that it is their right to dismiss any worker who pleads for a twelve-hour, instead of a fourteen-hour, day. And—”
Here Roosevelt interrupted with such vehemence that spittle flew from his lips. “And you must not forget, Mr. Sinclair, the shipbuilding trust,” he said, “that foul octopus of traitors, presided over in shameless pomposity by Senator Hale of Maine!” Here the President became so overwrought he pushed his plate from him, and began to pick his teeth agitatedly with a gold pick. In a breathless high-pitched voice he cried: “Gentlemen, I give you Senator Hale of Maine!—the most innately and essentially malevolent scoundrel that God Almighty ever allowed to exist on Earth! Why, it’s criminal how the man stonewalls against me—what lies and slanders he spins of my ‘fear’ of him! It has come to light that the traitor conspires with my enemies in Washington, that the shipbuilding trust shall ‘sail merrily’ over my grave. Hale should be hanged, sir!
They should all be hanged
.”
All at the table loudly concurred, except for the abashed guest; and discussion flowed over other traitors, like dirty water across the white linen tablecloth, that was itself, by this time, liberally splattered with spots and stains: persons as diverse as James J. Hill, J. P. Morgan, and George F. Baer, on the one hand; and David Graham Phillips on the other. (Phillips, a well-respected colleague of Upton’s, was the author of the courageous exposé “The Treason of the Senate,” then appearing in
Cosmopolitan;
one of his particular targets was Senator Hale from Maine.) The President seemed to have forgotten his guest of honor as he lapsed into a wrathful denunciation of the
tribe of muckrakers
themselves . . .
*
It was Upton’s attention, stated to his comrade-friends in New York City, that when he had the President’s ear he would broach the subject of immediate legislation to protect workers, and to guarantee some sort of absolute minimum wage; for it would be a sorry consequence of his labors if only the American meat-eaters were “protected.” But he could not wedge a word into the conversation, it seemed; it was not simply that Upton Sinclair was interrupted or ignored, but that he had become invisible; and much of the heated discussion dealt with matters, with individual Democrats and Republicans, of which he knew nothing. So, Upton sipped discontentedly at his glass of water, and thought it a melancholy irony that he should be at last at the White House, as the President’s guest, yet as powerless as ever. “Better to be hidden away in the countryside beyond Princeton,” he mused, “in my quaint little cabin, laboring over
The Jungle . . .
while Meta prepares a delicious dinner, and tends to little David. Ah, were we not happy then!”
After an hour the hearty luncheon was declared over, for, as Roosevelt said sternly, “There are some of us who work, sir—not
scribble.
” More genially the President laughed to his friends saying they could not spend all the day “bloviating and idling—as we might like.” The President shook Upton’s hand so vigorously that the young man’s teeth rattled, exclaiming: “Jolly good of you to drop by, sir! Most helpful! And when we meet again, Mr. Upton, it’s to be hoped that the damned traitorous packers will have been brought to their knees, like beef to the slaughter, and that scoundrel Hale hanged high!”
ON MAY 26,
1906, the papers trumpeted the news that Roosevelt’s bill regarding federal inspection of meat, afterward known as the Meat Inspection Act, had been passed after much quarreling in Congress; and nearly every editorial on the controversial subject spoke of the “triumph” of young Upton Sinclair: for did this not prove that justice might prevail, and that “the pen was mightier than the sword”?
Only Upton’s Socialist comrades understood the young author’s listlessness at the news, and his sense of having been betrayed, of which he scarcely dared speak to the reporters who besieged him. Upton was, however, inspired to make the single utterance for which he is known out of his long and heroic career, and his formidable outpouring of impassioned books numbering at nearly one hundred: “I aimed for the heart of America, and hit its stomach instead.”
NOW THE HARRIED
young man sits in clamorous Penn Station, hunched over his writing pad and composing as fast as his cramped hand will allow the piece for
Everybody’s Magazine
. It has just struck him that the striking figure of speech borrowed from Voltaire—or, more likely Hugo, since Yaeger Ruggles insisted it was Hugo—might after all be inappropriate to his purpose, for
REVOLUTION IS THE HOUR OF LAUGHTER
is a concept that might go over the heads of, or offend, the average reader of
Everybody’s;
and Upton has a dread of being misunderstood yet again. And there is very little to laugh at lately for “Big Bill” Hayward’s red banners, unfurled just the other day in Paterson, New Jersey, surely signal violence to come.
Upton was particularly hurt by encountering, in the press that very morning, President Roosevelt’s denunciation in a speech of certain “yellow journalists” and “muckrakers” bent on “stirring up discord in America.”
So, Upton crosses out his inspired title. But can’t think of a substitute.
Hearing
UPTON SINCLAIR!
amid the ceaseless murmur and clatter of the train station, yet steeling himself to resist; for he knows it is a phantom calling to him, and mocking him; a simulacrum of his own, future self in some unfathomable time. He dares not look up; he must keep his glance down, on the sheet of foolscap; he must concentrate, to save his life; falling to the task of covering one long sheet of foolscap in his small hand, and then reversing it, so that every inch of space will be utilized, and nothing wasted; and then a fresh sheet is produced out of the valise, and another. So immersed in his work is Upton Sinclair, the hands of the great clock in the center of the terminal now read 2:48 p.m. which means that the young author has missed his train to Englewood, and will not discover the fact for several minutes.
Yet there is no reason for immediate alarm, for another train to New Jersey will come along in an hour or two; and Upton Sinclair will see to it that he does not miss that one.
S
o the Curse seemed at last to have lifted, and the three Slade grandchildren entombed in the family mausoleum, Annabel, Oriana, and Todd, were roused from their stony trance, sometime in the early afternoon of June 4; and, at the antipodes of the Earth, in the Southern Ocean, in the hold of the pitching and tossing
Balmoral,
Josiah was restored to life, to the amazement of Captain Oates and his crew, who would swear that, frozen in the ocean, he must certainly have died.
A miracle, it would be said—or indeed, miracles. And directly related to Todd Slade’s adventure in the Bog Kingdom, and his grandfather’s death in Princeton. Yet historians have tried to explain these unique events as “natural”—the original origins of death having been mistaken. For the young persons entombed in the Slade mausoleum might have suffered a rare category of catalepsy, or a relatively benign strain of the Laotian sleeping sickness; or, it may have been, an hypothesis suggested in the anonymously penned
The Vampire Murders of Old Princeton,
an insidious form of mesmerism.
“For the very fact that the young people now
live
necessitates the fact that they never
died
”—this was the verdict of Dr. Hiram Hastings of the Harvard Medical School, summoned to Princeton to give an expert diagnosis of the bizarre development of three individuals, of the same family, “coming to life” at the same time, in their family tomb. (It was Todd who shouted loudest, attracting the attention of the terrified groundskeeper of the Princeton Cemetery, who could not believe his ears, and then could not believe his eyes; and would never wholly recover from his shock.)
Dr. Hastings’s much-deliberated conclusion was that the young Slades had lapsed into comatose conditions in which breathing, heartbeat, and other vital signs were suppressed; but responsible physicians and medical workers should have detected life in their bodies and brain activity of a kind, by shining a beam of light into the individual’s eye, in which an involuntary reflex of the pupil would signal life. Told that reputable physicians in Princeton, notably Dr. Boudinot, Sr., and Dr. Boudinot, Jr., had “thoroughly examined” their patients before declaring them dead, and signing death certificates, the Harvard doctor said, with a bemused smile, “Yes. But this is Princeton, you see. This is not Boston, Massachusetts, where our medical standards are higher.”
It seems that Josiah Slade was not in fact “frozen” in the waters of the Southern Ocean but had been subjected so quickly to so low a temperature, his body had reacted by reverting to a state virtually prenatal, or mimicking hibernation; in Josiah too, breathing, heartbeat, and vital signs were gravely suppressed, and only a cursory examination of his “frozen” body was made by Captain Oates and his appalled physician (in fact, a dropout of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and not a licensed M.D.) before he was declared dead, his body wrapped in canvas and placed in the hold, to be interred when the
Balmoral
returned to New York Harbor at the end of the summer.
(Though awakened at the time of the others, Josiah did not return to Princeton until late August, for the
Balmoral
continued on its expeditionary journey into the south polar region, as planned.)
Josiah, too, had quite terrorized his shipboard companions by pounding on a door to the hold, and shouting loudly. Since none of the crew would open the door to him, Captain Oates had had to be summoned; and he, like the Princeton cemetery groundskeeper, would never wholly recover from his shock. Captain Oates seems soon then to have retired from sea-going, to vanish into the mountainous regions of upstate New York and the anonymity of a landlocked life.
It was a very good thing that none of the young people could remember the circumstances of their “dying,” or lying in state, or being entombed. All had the confused belief that they had slumbered deeply, and would not have wished to be awakened. For was not their sleep, as Macbeth had spoken yearningly of sleep, a “raveling up of the sleeve of care”; had they not slipped from a place of grief, and, in waking, found themselves restored to a semblance of their old happiness?
Annabel was never to remember having “given birth”—though in her dreams she would perceive the image of a floating “ghost baby” with features too indistinct to be seen; and of an identity totally unknown to her.
The youngest, Oriana, was yet more soft-spoken and reticent than she’d been in her previous life, except at odd, mercurial moments when she burst into nervous laughter, or tears; she remembered nothing of her fall from a high roof of Wheatsheaf, but spoke wonderingly of her flight into Heaven, the movement of her “white-feathered wings”—the joy of being borne aloft in the air as if bodiless. Her companion was a hawk, she said, of noble proportions; a female hawk, she seemed to know, with “golden” eyes—“How I wished I could fly with her forever! But my wings were not strong enough, and she flew on without me; and I had to come back, to my home.”
Todd recovered slowly from his ordeal, having lost a good deal of weight since his “death”; he then confounded all the family with his memento of the Bog Kingdom, as he called it—a single black checker, of carved wood; a very old piece it seemed, which was found clutched in his fingers when he awakened in the dark of the tomb.
By degrees, over a period of weeks, Todd regained some of his memory, and was encouraged by Annabel to dictate his story to her, that all of the world might know of his experiences; which account has been included here in its entirety, in the chapter titled “A Game of Draughts.” Todd rejected the notion, as an insult, that he had simply “frozen” to a comatose state in the cemetery, while visiting his cousin’s and his sister’s tomb; it was Todd’s insistence that he hadn’t been in the cemetery at all at that time, but in his grandfather Winslow Slade’s library where he dimly recalled the fireplace with the secret passageway beyond, and how he had made his way through. (Yet, when Todd and Annabel examined the fireplace in their grandfather’s library, all the bricks were in place, and none were loose, or could have loosened. “It is a perfect brick wall,” Annabel observed, “through which no one, not even a wily snake, could crawl.”)
Following the trauma of her “death” Annabel Slade recovered by slow degrees to a semblance of her former self; she would not regain her youthful beauty, which may have been fragile and fleeting as the roses in her mother’s garden, but acquired a more thoughtful, if slightly ironic look of female sensitivity; her forehead was just perceptibly lined, with worry-frowns etched permanently in her skin; her smile was not so spontaneous as it had been, but rather hesitant, and guarded. Annabel had become one who distrusts happiness—until it has been proven to her that the happiness is genuine. Of the four grandchildren, Annabel was the most afflicted by amnesia; she would recall virtually nothing of the long episode she had told her family, which was recorded by Josiah in the invaluable Turquoise-Marbled Book; fortunately for her, she recalled nothing of her grotesque pregnancy, and its aftermath. So confused was the young woman, when first she’d wakened, and was removed to Crosswicks, to familiar quarters, she persisted in claiming that she “knew she must not marry Dabney Bayard but must break the engagement at once”—as if the year were still 1905, and the date sometime before June 4. She told her parents: “Dabney does not love me, I know. He loves my ‘Slade’ name—he loves this estate. He may not like women at all—at least, he does not like
me
. And I don’t love him—I don’t feel for him any portion of what I feel for you, or Josiah. And though it may disappoint and anger you, dear parents, I don’t think I want to marry anyone at all.”
Henrietta and Augustus must have exulted, that their (naively optimistic) prayers had been answered: their beloved daughter restored to them
as she had been;
that is, innocent, and in a sense a virgin; for, her experience being guiltless as it seems to have been, Annabel could no more be counted as the illicit bride of Axson Mayte than she had been the bride of Lieutenant Bayard. (Their marriage had been annulled, and so was stricken from any and all church records.)
“I will never leave you again, dear parents,” Annabel said gaily, “—at least, I will never leave Princeton or—at least, I will never leave New Jersey. That is my promise.”
Of the four morbidly afflicted grandchildren, Josiah was the most clinically curious regarding his experience in that “other” world. He was certain that he’d been conscious all the while he’d been in the hold of the ship; mistaken as dead, he’d certainly been plunged into a deep sleep, with imperceptible vital signs. The barking of dogs close by his head, the whinnying of horses, the howling of winds, the creaking of the ship—these were phantasms in his dreams, yet very real. Vividly he remembered his sister in distress, on an ice floe in the Southern Ocean; he remembered her calling to him; and he remembered hurrying to her rescue—but beyond that, he remembered nothing. Except for growing gaunt from lack of food, Josiah had been refreshed from his sleep; and in this sleep, his evil “voices” vanished. Having wakened from his enchantment Josiah believed that he was fully himself again, as he had not been for a year or more; and never again suffered the incursion of alien thoughts, that had so made his life a torment.
“The first act of my newly regained sanity,” Josiah said, “was to disengage myself from the folly of the South Polar expedition, which was poorly funded and poorly staffed; when the men set forth on land, led by Oates, I remained safely on the
Balmoral
with a few other men, to write in my journal and compose my thoughts. Men were lost in the polar region—all of the ponies were lost, and half the dogs—God only knows what the survivors had to do, to survive those grim months. But they did return. And so we all returned to civilization, just a little later than scheduled.”
To his family, and to Annabel in particular, Josiah vowed that he would never again set sail for
terra incognita
—“There is the unknown world within, that quite suffices.”
THOUGH
The Accursed
is a chronicle of events primarily limited to 1905 to 1906, I think it is necessary to suggest an immediate future beyond the buoyant summer of 1906 when all of the Slades were reunited, except for the unhappy Copplestone. Within the year, through a set of serendipitous circumstances, Josiah and Annabel joined the Helicon Home Colony in the countryside near Englewood, New Jersey; for Josiah had another time sought out Upton Sinclair, at an Intercollegiate Socialist rally in New York, and established a connection with the young organizer, whom he introduced to Annabel, and eventually to Wilhelmina Burr, who joined the Colony at a slightly later date. (When Annabel and Wilhelmina at last embraced, having not seen each other since the morning of Annabel’s wedding, Wilhelmina burst into tears declaring that she had never in her heart believed that her dear friend had died; somehow, she had known that Annabel was still living, in some way unfathomable to the world. “And now, I hope never to let you out of my sight again,” Wilhelmina vowed, “or, at least, out of the range of my love.”) And there came to live in the Colony the former seminarian and now avid Socialist Yaeger Ruggles, who became a close friend and comrade to all, as one with particularly “radical and revolutionary” ideas ranging from union organizing to farming, worker-owned factories to “race-free” education and housing; ideas, unfortunately, far ahead of their time.
The Helicon Home Colony was comprised of several stucco-and-wood-frame buildings including a residence that had been a boys’ dormitory, that had had to be renovated, for use of the commune; the property included some two hundred acres of fertile land, both cultivated and wooded, stretching from the Old Jericho Road north and eastward past Lockwood Gorge. The Colony was to prove, at the first, at least, a happy retreat for the idealistic young people who had had quite enough, as they phrased it, of proper bourgeois society; and wished to apply their energies to such disciplines as agronomics, organic agriculture, animal husbandry, and greenhouse-horticulture. When not involved in Socialist activities in New York City, Josiah was much absorbed in the breeding and training of Peruvian horses, whose beauty and grace quite bewitched him. Wilhelmina persevered in her art, hoping to cultivate a “women’s Socialist aesthetic”; Annabel concentrated upon writing, and the upkeep of the Colony to which, like Josiah, she contributed virtually all of her trust-fund money.
Though the young “farmers” were novices at the time they began their venture, Upton Sinclair had been canny enough to invite more experienced individuals to join the commune, to help with the outdoors; it was his dream that one day soon, in another year or two, the Helicon Home Colony might expand to include fifty members, a hundred members, two hundred—“Eventually, we might revolutionize the world!” Upton had charted a five-year plan by which the Colony would soon become self-sustaining, and even profitable; in the meantime, they would supplement their income with private earnings, like those from his book royalties, and they would grow as much of their own food as they could, and sell what they could—“People in the area will know, they can trust
us
.”
In the early winter of ’06, that they might quell some of the slanderous and threatening things said of them by residents of Englewood and environs, there was a double wedding on the premises, presided over by an ordained (female) minister of the Brooklyn Unitarian Church, at which these couples were joined in matrimony: Josiah Slade and Wilhelmina Burr, and Annabel Slade and Yaeger Ruggles.
*
Of what lies ahead for idealistic young people in March 1907, this historian will not speak except to say that all survived the arson-set fire; for my chronicle has ended, and “ordinary life” must resume. My final scene is the double wedding ceremony at the Helicon Home Colony in a flower-garlanded setting, with Upton Sinclair boyishly smiling, shaking hands with the bridal couples and the guests, tears shining in his eyes: “Comrades! It is the dawn of a new day!
Revolution now!”