[lbo-talk] New target of right's ire -- not Moore or ACLU, but Upton Sinclair

[B.]

Thal about gettin' old school. It has to do with a
letter Sinclair wrote about Sacco and Vanzetti. Are
folks like Goldberg just now discovering there were
lots of radical writers around the WWI era or
something? Pretty pathetic! -B.


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http://editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001921199&imw=Y#

Sliming a Famous Muckraker: The Untold Story

A recent Los Angeles Times article, and then a
widely-published Jonah Goldberg column, questioned the
character of Upton Sinclair, based on the discovery of
a 1929 letter about the Sacco and Vanzetti case. One
problem: Some facts were overlooked or wrong.

By Greg Mitchell

(January 30, 2006) -- This is the story of a recent
Los Angeles Times “scoop” that was error-ridden and
misleading and resulted in a hysterical rightwing
attack, led by Jonah Goldberg, on a famed author
nearly 40 years after his passing.

It all began a little over a month ago, on Dec. 24,
with an article in the metro section of the L.A. Times
by Orange County reporter Jean O. Pasco, headlined,
“Sinclair Letter Turns Out to be Another Expose.” It
revealed that a Newport Beach attorney named Paul
Hegness had finally gotten around to exploring the
contents of a box of dusty old papers sitting in a
closet that he had purchased at an Irvine auction for
$100.

A letter postmarked Sept. 12, 1929, caught his eye. It
was addressed to lawyer John Beardsley. The return
address read: Upton Sinclair, Long Beach.

Sinclair, of course, was one of the original
muckrakers, a Pulitzer Prize winner, famed author of
dozens of novels including “The Jungle”--which sparked
overdue reform in the food industry—and a tireless
activist. As author of a 600-page book about his
nearly-successful 1934 campaign for governor of
California, I know a thing or two about the man, one
of the most fascinating, if often maddening, figures
of the 20th century. I’m even familiar with Beardsley.

So what did the 1929 letter contain that was so
interesting that it warranted a 1200-word Los Angeles
Times report and the attentions of syndicated
columnist Jonah Goldberg?

In it Sinclair informed his lawyer that he had met
with Fred Moore, identified by Pasco as attorney for
the legendary anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo
Vanzetti, who were executed in 1927 for killing two
men during a robbery in Braintree, Mass. Their trial
and execution drew worldwide protests, mainly from the
left side of the dial. Sinclair would write an epic
novel based on the case called “Boston,” one of his
best-known and well-regarded books.

Alone in a hotel room with the lawyer, "I begged him
to tell me the full truth,” Sinclair wrote in the 1929
letter. Moore “then told me that the men were guilty,
and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set
of alibis for them.”

The last paragraph of the note read: “This letter is
for yourself alone. Stick it away in your safe, and
some time in the 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.”

The Pasco article strongly suggests that Sinclair was
a hypocrite and liar, for he went on choosing to
believe that Sacco and Vanzetti were railroaded, wrote
a novel mocking the trial, and supposedly never told
anyone about the chat with Fred Moore. The article
calls Sinclair’s letter a “confession” and later “a
confessional.”

Strong stuff. But right after publication, one warning
flag appeared: The Times had to run a correction for
three fairly small errors in the story. It didn’t take
long, however, for conservative writers to jump on the
“revelation.”

A California assemblyman named Chuck DeVore declared
in Human Events magazine that the Pasco piece “lays
bares Sinclair’s true role in promoting left-wing
myths in America.” He urged readers to think of this
the next time they “see the heirs to this shameful
legacy with their banners and bumper stickers trying
to break our resolve in the face of evil.”

But leave it to Jonah Goldberg, writing in his
syndicated column (and at National Review Online), to
tie the Sinclair letter to George Clooney.

Goldberg opened his Jan. 5 column by citing a recent
quote from Clooney, in which the actor said he didn’t
know any time in history that liberals stood on “the
wrong side of social issues.” Now that Goldberg had
read the Sinclair story, he was ready to ridicule this
notion.

He declared that the article revealed that Sinclair
“knew” Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty — their lawyer
had told him the “unvarnished truth” -- and then
“quite simply, lied” about it to sell books and
protect the leftwing movement.

The Sacco and Vanzetti episode, of course, was just
one in a long line of misguided liberal causes,
Goldberg added, from defending Alger Hiss to declaring
that Matthew Shepard was killed because he was gay
(rather than being “a drug addict caught up with other
drug addicts”). Now George Clooney has “unilaterally
beatified” Edward R. Murrow, when the fact is, Murrow
“was just another journalist.”

Fear not, Jonah does get around to mentioning,
inevitably, Hillary Clinton, citing her youthful offer
to help a lawyer for the Black Panthers.

Even when liberals know they are on shaky ground,
their view, according to Goldberg, is: “It matters
not. Print the legend.” That’s why it’s hard to find a
liberal “martyr-saint” who has not been “burnished by
deceit.” It seems that when they reach “icon status,
the facts get inconvenient.”

Well, the facts prove a bit inconvenient for Goldberg
and Pasco, as well (even beyond the corrected errors
in the original L.A. Times piece).

For one thing, Goldberg claims that it was Sinclair’s
“The Jungle” that provoked Theodore Roosevelt to coin
the term “muckraker.” Sorry, it was a series of 1906
magazine articles by David Graham Philips.

More critically: Pasco describes Moore as “the men’s
lawyer” (meaning Sacco and Vanzetti). In fact, when he
met with Sinclair, he was their former lawyer—fired
over key disputes on how to handle the case. Goldberg
repeats this error. Would this make Moore, perhaps,
more likely to turn on the men?

Next, the whole Sinclair-Moore conversation is hardly
a scoop. It is recounted, for example, in the main
Sinclair biography to date, “Upton Sinclair: American
Rebel,” by Leon Harris, published in 1975. That book
finds Sinclair-- mirroring the newly-found letter--
telling a correspondent precisely what Moore said in
that same 1929 meeting. He asks leftwing writer Robert
Minor to keep the Moore charges quiet for the time
being as he wants to finish his novel and he feared
there was a real possibility “that some anarchist
might think it is his duty to keep me from finishing
the book.”

Now, getting to the real meat of the matter: Last
Thursday, a Reuters article by Arthur Spiegelman
appeared. He took the trouble to consider Sinclair’s
entire letter—which, it turns out, was three pages
long, typed. Pasco either didn’t see the whole thing,
or looked at it and chose to ignore key parts of it
(or her editor deleted it). Spiegelman, also unlike
Pasco and Goldberg, explored how Sinclair actually
portrayed the Sacco and Vanzetti case in “Boston.” Did
he indeed “lie” about what Moore told him, or make
proper use of it in a popular novel?

Spiegelman wrote that Goldberg “might have been better
served if he had read the entire letter instead of the
excerpts printed in the Times.” In a copy of the full
letter made available to Reuters, Sinclair explains
that soon after he talked to Moore he began to have
doubts about him: "I realized certain facts about Fred
Moore. I had heard that he was using drugs. I knew
that he had parted from the defense committee after
the bitterest of quarrels. ... Moore admitted to me
that the men themselves had never admitted their guilt
to him; and I began to wonder whether his present
attitude and conclusions might not be the result of
his brooding on his wrongs."

Sinclair had even questioned Moore's former wife, who
worked with the lawyer on the case, and she "expressed
the greatest surprise" saying he had not expressed
thoughts that the men were guilty before. All left out
of the Pasco, and Goldberg, articles.

In the letter, he also vowed his novel "Boston" would
tell all sides, focusing not on the question of
innocence but the lack of a fair trial—putting him on
very firm ground in that pursuit, most historians
agree. The two anarchists may, indeed, have been
guilty-- but the trial was an outrage.

Further, Anthony Arthur, whose new biography of
Sinclair will be published this June, provided
excerpts from the book to Spiegelman. They show that
in other letters, Sinclair quotes Moore as not even
being sure both men were guilty. "Moore said neither
man ever admitted it to him,” Arthur writes.

In other words, it was only Moore’s opinion: hardly
the “unvarnished truth,” as Goldberg presents it. Yet
Goldberg charged that Sinclair “knew” that the pair
were guilty and “quite simply, lied.”

And, finally, what about the charge that Sinclair
ignored Moore’s insights to save his lefty cred? In
fact, “Boston” is a nuanced novel (rare for Sinclair)
that introduces many reasons to question the
defendant’s innocence, and focuses on the question of
the trial itself and the evils of the death penalty.
In the same letter to Robert Minor, Sinclair explained
that despite the troubling views expressed by
Moore—and other debunkers--he could still write the
novel “on the basis of certainty that they did not
have a fair trial.”

In the end, the heroine of his novel was patterned on
himself: believing in the pair's innocence at the
beginning and ending not knowing quite what to
believe.

Arthur, the biographer, told Spiegelman that
Sinclair's decision to end "Boston" on a note of
ambiguity concerning Sacco and Vanzetti's guilt
subjected him to "a torrent of abuse from the left."
It came from Communists, anarchists and others on the
left—in other words, the kind of people Jonah Goldberg
loves to target. Robert Minor called Sinclair “a hired
liar, a coward and a traitor.”

Once blasted by the left for his handling of the case,
Spiegelman concludes, “Now he is being hit from the
right.” In each case, unjustly.

Greg Mitchell (gmitchell at editorandpublisher.com) is
editor of E&P. His book, "The Campaign of the Century:
Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and
the Birth of Media Politics," won the Goldsmith Book
Prize in 1993. It was made into a PBS documentary and
now a stage production.
 
 
Links referenced within this article

gmitchell at editorandpublisher.com