Reflections at Eighty
SINCLAIR, UPTON
By Upton Sinclair REFLECTIONS AT EIGHTY A famous writer looks at the United States and the world scene THE child's verses by James Whitcomb Riley warn you that the "gobble-uns" will get you "ef...
...I recognized myself as a bantling, and I was on the rocks all right, but I had my doubts about the rest...
...In chapel every morning there sat at the rear of the platform a row of the faculty members, elderly gentlemen all heavily bearded...
...and you can see what it is doing to Ike...
...THE BASIC FACT of our economy is the phenomenon of "boom and bust...
...By Upton Sinclair REFLECTIONS AT EIGHTY A famous writer looks at the United States and the world scene THE child's verses by James Whitcomb Riley warn you that the "gobble-uns" will get you "ef you don't watch out," but the verses don't tell you just where to watch, or how, and this is a serious oversight...
...Their word means nothing, and if you believe them, they are laughing at you behind your back...
...We mean to do it by the process of free and open discussion, and the democratic choosing of our legislators and telling them what to do...
...We arrive at this odd situation: We have invented a weapon so terrible that we cannot use it...
...We have learned to prevent bank failures now: The Government puts its credit behind the bankers...
...I have seen a list of such breaches, and the number is around 40 or 50...
...and it goes on without ceasing...
...And they stay in...
...We kept Britain and France from stopping Nasser for that reason, and we refrain from stopping Sukarno for the same reason...
...and some night a submarine might sneak up to the vicinity of Sandy Hook and—without ever surfacing —launch a hydrogen bomb over Manhattan Island and wipe out eight or ten million Americans in a fraction of a second...
...That is the only means by which our sequence of boom and bust can be made endurable to the mass of the people...
...credit expands, and everybody gets into debt...
...It was only later, in the school of hard knocks, that I learned the meaning of destitution in the midst of riotous wealth...
...and when the next big panic came, in 1907, I had my armor buckled on and my sword in hand...
...Booms are delightful and busts are terrible, but we can never have one without the other...
...King Coal, etc...
...also, they know that we have it...
...He founded the American Civil Liberties Union in California...
...we know it, and they know that we know it...
...We have to understand them, and at the same time resist them with our weapons of freedom...
...I was awed by them and sure they would be able to tell me about this matter of poverty in the midst of excessive wealth...
...In our economy goods are not produced for use, they are produced to be sold at a profit...
...BUT IN ALL OUR TALK about freedom, and in our efforts to defend it, we labor under one heavy handicap...
...All over the world, the Communist agents are working tirelessly...
...Of his later books (he has written over 70 novels and more than half dozen plays), Oil, World's End and Dragon's Teeth are among the best known...
...When I first came to California in 1916, I bought apricots at 3 cents a pound...
...In contrast to this, consider the situation in our own national capital, which happens to be a half-Southern city, with the color bar enforced in hotels, restaurants and theaters...
...And even so, the magic cards do not always work...
...a little war, a nice little one such as we had in Korea, will bring a "conservative" administration into power and keep it coasting along on promises for one term and part of another...
...now I pay 10...
...and now you know...
...skin of a boiled ham...
...They are building dams and steel mills and such in the backward lands, and with their engineers and trained workers go the secret agents and propagandists: dedicated and tireless men firm in their faith that Leninism is to rule the future...
...Everything had been expanding on credit...
...But we are powerless to deal with the results of the overproduction of the means of production...
...no, that would hurt the grocery trade...
...But it so happens that the backward peoples nearly all have skins that are yellow or red or brown or black...
...Many of our special interests have tried concealment of the truth and got away with it for a time, but always in the end the truth has come out, and in Government affairs it happens almost at once...
...This is where the Gobble-uns come in...
...It was an adventure to be awakened in the middle of the night and see my father strike a match and light the overhead gas jet, and to help him exterminate those small round black creatures which claimed prior possession of the bed and had sallied forth in an expedition known as "repel boarders...
...There come diplomats and officials, scientists and scholars from the dark-skinned races, and our State Department has found it necessary to issue official cards to some of these, certifying to their purity and propriety...
...I am calling them Gobble-uns playfully...
...I had to get it in the school of hard knocks, from men who were alumni of that school...
...As it happened, right there and then I was learning what hard times were by seeing them...
...I doubt if there is a country large or small in which the Communists are not showing films of Arkansas National Guardsmen with guns in their hands, using them to keep eight neatly dressed and badly frightened Negro children from getting an education in an American public high school...
...I lived under their administrations and can testify...
...A little war might turn into a big war...
...I say we are in the midst of a war, a life-and-death struggle for the minds and consciences of mankind...
...Perhaps you have been wondering why I mentioned the Gobble-uns at the beginning of this article...
...If only we could have another nice little war...
...He came into power on the promise to cut the budget by $40 billion...
...their god, whose name is Lenin, has specifically told them that they will have to do so in order to overcome the capitalist world and shape it according to their Communist dream...
...The professor of literature gave me, among other things, Emerson's essays as the summation of ethical teaching...
...The food in the Government warehouses must be allowed to spoil, while the Government gives the unemployed money to spend in the grocery stores...
...They are training in Russia twice as many scientists and technicians as we are...
...My mother said it was because my father was a "drinking man...
...or if he does he cannot get a hearing...
...If there is a boom, everybody is full of hope and the factories run full time...
...We have a double task, for we also have to bring about fundamental changes in our own economic system...
...but now Soviet Communism confronts us as the sworn enemy of all the freedoms our forefathers have won for us...
...I was living through the worst panic and depression America had known up to then...
...President Eisenhower is a well-meaning man...
...They shall not build and another inhabit...
...in his boyhood in Richmond, Virginia, he had been so hungry that he had eaten the On September 20, Upton Sinclair celebrates his 80th birthday...
...All the Government can do is to feed those who are thrown out of work when the great factories shut down...
...they follow as inevitably as day and night...
...Among the courses I attended was one on "Practical Ethics...
...The profits of modern mass production are enormous, much more than the profit-takers can spend for their own use, so they invest them in more means of production...
...everybody was doing business on hope...
...My study of economic problems began three-quarters of a century ago, when at the age of four or five it was my fate to sleep across the foot of my parents' bed, in a room in some cheap lodging-house in New York...
...My father said it was because of the Civil War...
...The Soviets spend several times as much on what they call "agitprop," agitation and propaganda, as we spend in making our ideas known to the world...
...The Gobble-uns, on the other hand, lie and deceive on principle, and as a religious duty...
...My maternal grandfather, a railroad official in Baltimore and a deeply religious gentleman, told me that it was God's will, and that I should "learn to do my duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call me...
...All this takes place blindly, by guesswork...
...Born in Baltimore in 1878, he established his reputation as a muck-raking author before the First World War with such books as The Jungle, The Money-Changers...
...The "gobble-uns" of Riley's day came only in the night, but nowadays they come both night and day...
...They pick out likely young prospects and send them to Moscow, expenses paid, for training in both technology and hatred of America...
...But that didn't keep the boom-and-bust cycle from working through their administrations...
...But don't think that the Government can give them the food it has bought from farmers to save the farmers from ruin...
...But none of them ever did...
...Students from all the world are treated alike—whether their skins be white or yellow or red or brown or black...
...I had not learned about the causes of poverty from a college controlled by a series of Tammany Hall administrations, and I did not learn it at a university controlled by the wealthiest board of trustees in the world...
...last season I paid 19, and next season I shall pay 21 or more...
...One side or the other might be willing to use it, but what would be the good if it couldn't keep the other side from using it...
...What we have now, and must be satisfied to have, is "cold war...
...For the Gobble-uns have the bomb...
...A Socialist since the turn of the century, Sinclair ran for Congress in 1906 as a Socialist candidate from New Jersey, for Governor of California in 1926 and 1930, and again in 1934 as a Democratic candidate...
...Wars between nations begin and end and peace is declared...
...even if we wanted to lie, we couldn't, because of our heritage of freedom of speech and press...
...that is to say intrigue, subversion, propaganda...
...So were Harrison, McKinley, Taft and Hoover, all honorable men...
...I didn't understand those dreadful things, because I asked my professors about them, and believed what they told me...
...After five years of City College, I went up to Columbia University for four post-graduate years, and here again I thought the prestigious professors would tell me about the cause of poverty in the midst of wealth...
...I took them to my hall bedroom—four flights up, and $1.25 a week (I was living on $4.50 a week, which I earned by writing jokes for newspaper funny pages...
...always see it...
...Emerson told me, in poetic language, that if you cast the bantling on the rocks his hands would be power and his feet would be speed...
...but the war against unearned wealth and special privilege goes on without ceasing, day or night, and it will not cease until we have attained that state set forth by the prophet Isaiah: "They shall build houses and inhabit them...
...I was attending the City College of New York, a youngster still wearing short pants...
...in proportion to relative wealth, it may be ten times as much...
...they shall not plant and another eat...
...Those words are "Little Rock...
...nobody knows exactly how many automobiles will be wanted next year...
...I was properly contemptuous of Bryan with his "Cross of Gold" speech, and I would have voted for McKinley if I had been old enough...
...My Uncle Harry told me it would make a man of me, it would "put hair on my chest...
...The outcome of these procedures is that the economy gets another jolt of inflation...
...Never, I hope, shall we see in America the mockery of an "election" such as we recently saw in the Soviet Union—millions of people being herded to the polls to cast ballots with only one set of candidates...
...The panic of 1907 was explained to me by a Wall Street man: "Somebody asked for a dollar...
...in the Soviet Empire, Ivan at the same age has mastered trigonometry...
...We are going out to do battle for the minds of all the more backward peoples of the earth...
...as a student of history, I understand them to be the product of millennia of ruthless and hateful despotism...
...and we fight that war with handcuffs on our wrists and a ball and chain on our ankles...
...If we lose, what we lose is America...
...THERE IS one way the basic problem, overproduction, can be solved, and that is by a war...
...The reasons are obvious...
...I was so poor that I couldn't buy a newspaper to read about it, but I saw the breadlines, the beggars on the streets, the families turned out of their tenement rooms and having no place to take their pitiful belongings...
...and they shall plant vineyards and eat the fruit of them...
...It was obvious to me from the outset that, before the professor had got his complicated legislation passed, the bosses, with the "graft" at their command, would have devised ways to bring it to nought...
...My Uncle Bland, who was on the way to becoming one of the richest men in Baltimore, offered to take me into his financial institution...
...they come waving red banners with hammers and sickles on, and singing a hymn in which they tell you they are the international army which will be the human race...
...I have slept with them by my bedside now for more than half a century...
...When I was 14 years old my professor of physics, J. Ogden Doremus, a local celebrity of that day, had told me: "Never believe what I tell you...
...Perhaps it took blind fanaticism to overcome and destroy the power of the Tsardom...
...Here in our land of the free we are wondering why we can't teach Johnny to read...
...I venture the guess that two short words—only 10 letters—which have recently gone out from America have presented a billion dollars worth of propaganda to the Communists in all the five continents and the thousands of islands on this earth...
...A big war destroys so much property of all sorts that it makes a boom for a decade...
...But by then I knew that I wanted to be a writer...
...and suddenly the whole structure crashed...
...we have to win that battle, or see the Gobble-uns win it and shut us off from a great part of the oil and minerals and other products needed by our economy...
...So it came about that a tiny child began plaguing his relatives with the question, "Why are some people poor and other people rich...
...They are easy enough to watch, but what else to do is the problem of our time...
...If we fail to, if we continue to harbor and manifest race prejudice, we are handing the enemy the one weapon that can lay us in the dust...
...This seems to be an act of Providence, and we have to adjust our minds to it...
...and now you see him boosting it by various inflationary schemes—in a desperate effort to keep the bust from busting wider and bringing in a lot of radical Democrats in November...
...I found that the good Professor James Hyslop had evolved a set of elaborate schemes for overcoming the evil power of political "bosses...
...While we were saving them from Hitler they made a mass of agreements with us, and the moment he was dead they began breaking them...
...Airplanes and atomic power have made the whole world one, and it will be either a free world or a slave world with fancy Red labels...
...When I was a lad I couldn't afford to pay one cent for a newspaper...
...In propaganda we are hopelessly and irrevocably committed to the truth...
...Everybody sees this, and nobody knows what to do about it...
...But the trouble is, the mad scientists have come up with so many new ways of mass killing that we just don't dare use any of them...
...There used to be soapboxes, but now there is traffic...
...To them, all races and nations are alike and the only enemy is capitalism...
...the last won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1943...
...What this amounts to is that wars have become too dangerous to be endured...
...and the pupils study six days a week, and six nights as well...
...if only we could go in and put the kibosh on Nasser, and maybe Sukarno, in whose country our businessmen own precious oil wells...
...and vet we have to keep it up in the air, day and night, forever and ever, on the chance that the other side might try to shoot first...
...There are those who tell us that ours is a "white man's country" and they mean to keep it that way...
...For these kinds of war the Red Gobble-uns are far better equipped than we...
...and I have no doubt that every one of them has been shown a film called Little Rock...
...Can you imagine the reports which these sensitive men and their wives carry back to their own people...
Vol. 41 • October 1958 • No. 32
