THE COMBATIVE INNOCENT

You don't have to be satisfied with America as you find it. You can change it. So wrote Upton Beall Sinclair of an era that cried out for reform at almost every level of American life. He was a quixotic dreamer, an eccentric, a compulsive dissenter in the intellectual tradition of a Thoreau or a Tom Paine. Yet Sinclair, who died last week at 90 in a New Jersey nursing home, battled so many causes to the finish that the American conscience and the quality of American life were permanently affected by his concern, courage and compassion. And, more than six decades before today's politics of protest and confrontation, Author Sinclair won his crusades with no weapon more lethal than a powerful and prolific pen.

His most celebrated novel was The Jungle, published in 1906, which told the harrowing story of a Lithuanian immigrant worker in Chicago's meat-packing industry. Though Sinclair's main intention was to dramatize the plight of a helpless proletarian, he described the then prevalent filth and brutality of the industry in shockingly graphic terms. The Jungle, turned down by five publishers before Doubleday, Page & Co. accepted it, was front-page news and an instant bestseller. Meat sales slumped throughout the U.S. Within months, Congress passed the nation's first pure-foods law and required more than cursory federal meat inspection. Said Sinclair: "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

Pizened Sausages. Finley Peter Dunne's fictional humorist, the Irish bartender Mr. Dooley, imagined the scene when President Theodore Roosevelt first read The Jungle: "Tiddy was toying with a light breakfast an' idly turnin' over th' pages iv th' new book with both hands. Suddenly he rose fr'm th' table, an' cryin': 'I'm pizened,' begun throwin' sausages out iv th' window." Author Sinclair lunched at the White House with T.R., though presumably not on sausages. The President later wrote Sinclair's publisher: "Tell Sinclair to go home and let me run the country for a while."

The Jungle is a classic of American social reform, and it put Sinclair first in the company of early 20th century muckrakers: Frank Norris (The Octopus, The Pit), Ida Tarbell (The History of the Standard Oil Company), and Jack London (The War of the Classes). Sinclair started a short-lived Utopian community in New Jersey, called the Helicon Home Colony, with the $30,000 he earned from The Jungle.

Every Injustice. Sinclair came from a shabby-genteel Maryland family, absorbing from that background both a breadth of interests and a sympathy for other havenots. He helped support himself in college by peddling jokes to newspapers for $1 each. He ground out several pulp novels before The Jungle, and he read even faster than he wrote: in one two-week Christmas holiday, he got through all of Shakespeare's plays and Milton's poetry.

Then he came to socialism, with a convert's religious fervor. After The Jungle, he turned out millions of words of social criticism attacking every injustice he saw: a corrupt press (The Brass

Check), money-grubbing ministers (The Profits of Religion), land exploitation by the California petroleum industry (Oil!), subservience of universities to business (The Goose-Step), cowardly book publishers (Money Writes!), the prosecution of Sacco and Vanzetti (Boston), the baronial life of Henry Ford (The Flivver King), and the ruthlessness of mine owners in the 1913-14 Colorado strike (King Coal). Sinclair also crusaded for birth control and childlabor laws, and helped found the American Civil Liberties Union.

EPIC Campaign. As a Socialist, Sinclair ran unsuccessfully in California for the U.S. Senate in 1922 and for Governor in 1926 and 1930. He switched to the Democrats and won their nomination for Governor in the 1934 primary by 436,000 votes. His EPIC platform--End Poverty in California--was probably as radical as that of any major party in U.S. history: applying Marxist theory, he proposed to turn over to the workers some of the means of production--in this case, California's Depression-idled farms and factories. Led by the Los Angeles Times, his alarmed opposition charged that Sinclair planned to Sovietize the state and nationalize children. Despite the scare campaign against him, he came within 259,000 votes of winning.

As World War II approached, Sinclair returned to writing full time. He began the eleven-volume series of novels that had as its unlikely hero Lanny Budd, a wealthy young American art dealer who wangles a secretary's job at the 1919 Paris peace conference and manages to find a front-row seat at nearly every historic event from then through 1949. The Lanny Budd novels contain in simple form a fictionalized, you-are-there chronicle of the 20th century. Dragon's Teeth (1942), third in the series, describes the rise of Hitler and won Sinclair a Pulitzer Prize in 1943.

George Bernard Shaw, who once proposed Sinclair for the Nobel Prize, told him: "When people ask me what happened in my long lifetime, I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to authorities but to your novels." Sinclair has probably been read as widely abroad as any U.S. writer, and in spite of his antiCommunism, he is particularly popular in the Soviet Union. At recent count, there were 772 translations of his books in 47 languages, published in 39 countries.

Jesus and Shelley. Sinclair's writing was long-winded, his naivete often distracting, his fiction more polemical than literary. He was a vegetarian who lived on brown rice, fresh fruit, celery and dried milk. He never smoked or drank (his temperance tracts were inspired by the sad example of his father, an alcoholic whisky salesman). He dabbled in spiritualism.

Despite his eccentricities, Sinclair was a quiet, gentle man who claimed an unexceptionable pantheon of heroes: Jesus, Hamlet and Shelley. Critic Alfred Kazin called his special quality "combative innocence." Sinclair, wrote Kazin, represented "one of the last ties we have with that halcyon day when Marxists still sounded like Methodists."

Not long ago, Sinclair said of his life: "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." He fought that fight well and effectively. Last year, in recognition of his pioneering role in advocating consumer-protection legislation, Lyndon Johnson invited him back to the White House for the first time since his lunch with Teddy Roosevelt. Fittingly, the occasion was the signing of the Wholesome Meat Act, which filled the few remaining loopholes in the law Sinclair had inspired in 1906.

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